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IndianFolklifeA QUARTERLY NEWSLETTERFROM NATIONAL FOLKLORE SUPPORT CENTRE Serial No.24 October 2006On Memory:Processes and SupportsGuest Editor: Nicole Revel

2B O A R D O F T R U S T E E SCHAIRMANNATITIONALFOLKLOLKLORESUPPOUPPORT CENTRENational Folklore Support Centre (NFSC) is a nongovernmental,non-profit organisation, registered in Chennaidedicated to the promotion of Indian folklore research, education,training, networking and publications. The aim of the centre isto integrate scholarship with activism, aesthetic appreciation withcommunity development, comparative folklore studies withcultural diversities and identities, dissemination of informationwith multi-disciplinary dialogues, folklore fieldwork withdevelopmental issues and folklore advocacy with publicprogramming events. Folklore is a tradition based on any expressivebehaviour that brings a group together, creates a convention andcommits it to cultural memory. NFSC aims to achieve its goalsthrough cooperative and experimental activities at various levels.NFSC is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.C O N T E N T SOn Memory: Processes and supports ................ 3The Cultural Referents of a Punjabi Lay ............. 6The Meaningfulness of Recentering:Case Study of a Thar Narrative ........................ 9Singing Tales and Reading chapbooks:The Bhojpuri Tradition… ................................. 12The Memory of Gods: From a SecretAutobiography to a Nationalistic Project ............ 15Drawing a Genealogy of Western Nepal'sGenealogies .................................................. 18Variation and Interaction between Musical andVisual Components in a Kerala Ritual forSnake Deities ................................................ 21Announcement.............................................. 23Purushartha, Social Sciences in South Asia ......... 24Disclaimer:The views expressed in the articles of Indian Folklife arethat of the authors concerned and they do not representthe views of National Folklore Support Centre.Cover illustration:Cover illustration and design motifs used in this issueare from the Kerala tradition of floor paintings knownby the name "Kalamezhuthu - Dhoolichitram" (Literaltranslation: Field Writing and Songs) Courtesy: NFSCArchives (presented by K.U. Krishnakumar)All communications should be addressed to:The Editor, Indian Folklife,National Folklore Support Centre,#508, V Floor, Kaveri Complex,96, Mahatma Gandhi Road,Nungambakkam, Chennai - 600 034 (India)Tele/Fax: 91-44-28229192 / 42138410info@indianfolklore.org, muthu@md2.vsnl.net.inJyotindra JainProfessor and Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New DelhiTRUSTEESAjay S. MehtaExecutive Director, National Foundation for India, India Habitat Centre,Zone 4-A, UG Floor, Lodhi Road, New DelhiAshoke ChatterjeeB-1002, Rushin Tower, Behind Someshwar 2, Satellite Road,AhmedabadN. Bhakthavathsala ReddyDean, School of Folk and Tribal Lore, WarangalDadi D. PudumjeeManaging Trustee, The Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust,B2/2211 Vasant Kunj, New DelhiDeborah ThiagarajanPresident, Madras Craft Foundation, ChennaiMolly KaushalAssociate Professor, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts,C.V. Mess, Janpath, New DelhiMunira SenExecutive Director, Madhyam, BangaloreK. RamadasKaramballi, Via Santosh Nagar, UdupiY. A. Sudhakar ReddyProfessor and Head, Centre for Folk Culture Studies,S. N. School, HyderabadVeenapani ChawlaDirector, Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Research, PondicherryEXECUTIVE TRUSTEE AND DIRECTORM.D. MuthukumaraswamySTAFFAssistant DirectorT.R. Sivasubramaniam(Administration)Accounts AssistantR. VeerasekarSecretaryDeepa RameshLibrarianR. MuruganProgramme Assistant(Publications)C.V.M. LeellavathiGraphic DesignerP. SivasakthivelProgramme Officer(Public Programmes)V. Hari SaravananResearch Assistant(Public Programmes)J. Vijay Ratna KumarArchivistB. JishamolEducational Co-ordinatorA. SivarajSupport StaffV. ThennarasuC. KannanREGIONAL RESOURCEPERSONSV. JayarajanKuldeep KothariMoji RibaK.V.S.L. NarasamambaNima S. GadhiaParag M. SarmaSanat Kumar MitraSatyabrata GhoshShikha JhinganSusmita PoddarM.N. VenkateshaMrinal MedhiINDIAN FOLKLIFEEDITORIAL TEAMM.D. MuthukumaraswamyEditorNicole RevelGuest EditorC.V.M. LeellavathiAssociate EditorP. SivasakthivelPage Layout & DesignFor Internet broadcasting schedule and public programmes schedule at Indian School of Folklore, please visithttp://www.indianfolklore.orgINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

E D I T O R I A L3NICOLE REVEL, Langues-Musiques-Sociétés(LMS), UMR CNRS-Paris V, Université RenéDescartes Email: revel@vjf.cnrf.frThis issue of Folklife is a brief presentation of Frenchresearch in South Asia. In order to explore newdata and insights, on the basis of a comparativeapproach and scholarly debates, since 2001, aninterdisciplinary seminar « Processes and Supports of SocialMemory », has been launched at the Centre André-Georges Haudricourt (C.N.R.S) and at the Centre derecherche sur l’Oralité (CRO) Institut des Langues etCivilisations Orientales (INALCO),in Paris. It bringstogether the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics,ethnopoetics and ethnomusicology, history of religionand history.Long sung or spoken narratives, often linked to rituals,are presented irrespective of whether they belong tosocieties with a living oral tradition or societies with amixed oral and written tradition, as in the case of India.This shows an amazing variety of Speech Arts and theirpower, transformations in form and in semantic content.Our aim is to safeguard, analyse and comprehend, fromthe native view, this Intangible Heritage of oral traditionsand expressions.According to the various Traditions, the singer of talescomposes a narrative following either fixed or changing“paths”, as he performs. Bringing to surface the“landmarks” of such paths and the mnemonic devicesat work in the miscellaneous expressions of oralcomposition, is one of our aims. Some cultures set inmotion mnemonic devices extremely rigid: memory isexclusively attentive to the signifier and training is basedon very complex syllabic scales and sound exercises:virtuosity in articulation, syllabic permutations andplaits, mastery of voice in melody, timbre, modulationand ornamentation, this type of transmission requires arelationship of Master to disciple as is still practisedtoday in the Vedic schools of South India. Other culturesappreciate more flexibility at the sound level incomposition, but they are carefully attentive to the logicalschemes underlying the narrative and the plot. As thesingers of tales perform long sung narratives, aninexhaustible matter has to be explored. I propose thatwe consider the singing of a long narrative (epic, ballad,lay etc.), as a “skilled activity”, like playing the piano orplaying chess. Mental processes together with bodyOn Memory:Processesand SupportsNICOLE REVELINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006motions - this embodied and locatedorality - training devices and thework of memory based on auralperception, emotion and creativity,are as many quests and queries incognitive sciences whereHumanities and Social Sciences canplay a genuine and fruitful part.Smrti, « memorised Tradition » andShruti, «audition» and« revelation », the literary source ofIndian Law, (Dharmasûtra and Dharmpaçâstra), in contrastwith the perception of voice, rhythms and wordsinspired by supernatural poetic power (the ensemble ofVedic texts) are the closest Indian notions. Anerudite Tradition combining the oral and the written,highly praising poetry and resting on an immensesubstratum and practice of oral transmission is alive.As anthropologists and linguists, India specialists inFrance today, are more and more inclined to study FolkTradition, at the urban, the rural and the tribal communitylevels.In order to observe and detect techniques and practicesrelated to each “Memorial”, codification, memorisationand transmission are our main focuses. Various formsof interaction and interlocution are observed and analysedas narratives while rituals and other formal speech actsare analysed as performances. An ethnographicdescription is carried on with the help of linguistic,ethnopoetical and ethnomusicological approaches. Theuse of miscellaneous supports - gestures, motions andmovements; voices, rhythms and melodies - is takeninto account. Recent multimedia technology is of greathelp for transferring our methods and insights.Recordings with audiotapes, audio-video tapes andfilms, elaboration of hypertexts with CD-Rom and nowDVD-video combining sound, films, photos, texts andcomments, allow the safeguarding of long narrative andcomplex rituals in performance. Thus reiterativevisualisation of a very complex event and the buildingof new digital archives are made possible.Attention shall also be lent to visual tangible supportssuch as chapbooks (puthi) and graphism, either on paper,cloth (patua; par), shell, wood, bamboo, or lontara (Palmyrpalm), as found in many cultures of South Asia,continental and islands of Southeast Asia. Other iconicsupports are equally studied: face paintings andcostumes, theatres of actors, shadow plays and puppetry,all forms of creativity related to theatre and the performingArts. These actions and multimodal experiences takeplace during performances–a privileged moment tocapture and bring to light mnemonic devices,transmissions of know-how and mastery of composition.Music, kinesic, and plastic expressions are necessarilypart of these compositions. Transmission processes arebased upon the following: strategies guiding musical,vocal, narrative, discursive and praxemic artistic actionsand expressions; training by silent, non verbalised

4showing techniques; training with explicit teaching(comments, treaties); respect for the Word, respect forthe Master, respect for the Book, stimulate mimeticactions, faithful reiteration, yet creation. As far as thetranslation is concerned, it has to be particularly accurate,aiming at rendering a relevant, interpretative synthesisof the various symbolic forms and practices.Simultaneously, searching for concrete/abstractmanifestations of mental processes at work isundertaken. As the analysis develops, places and eventsthat structure the experience of Temporality of therespective groups, are taken into account and analysed.History of this ResearchIn a certain way, this seminar of research is acontinuation of a Seminar on: “Literature of Voice: Epics”that I conducted, with the assistance of C. ChampionServan-Schreiber, from 1991 to 2000 at the CRO. This wasone of five international seminars, integrated to the“Integral Study of Silk Roads: Roads of Dialogue”, a vastprogram of UNESCO which was part of the Decade forCultural Development (1988-1998).In the year 1990, I launched the project on in a seminarjointly organised by INTACH, Archaeological Survey ofIndia and UNESCO in chennai.In 1992, a conference launched the five integrated seminarprograms in Paris: “Les Routes de la Soie: Problèmesscientifiques et culturels”.As far as the seminar on “Epics” was concerned, severalinternational workshops took place in various countriesof Europe and Asia.In Europe: The first one, “Epics Along the Silk Roads”,was convened by Lauri Honko in Turku and focused onthe notion of “mental text” (1992). The contributions werepublished later as a special issue of “Oral Tradition” atthe Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, University ofMissouri-Columbia. The Folklore Fellows’ SummerSchools then developed. The second one was convenedin Boon by Walter Heissig (1992) on “Ethnography and OralTradition”, followed by a third one in Sankt Augustin(1994), organised by Walter Heissig and Rudiger Schotton:”Oral Tradition: Their Preservation, Publication andIndexing”. The next was convened by Karl Reichl nearBonn on: “Epics: Performance and Music” (1997).In Asia: Earlier in February, an utterly stimulatingworkshop was organised by Kapila Vatsyayan,B.N Saraswati at the Indira Gandhi National Centre forthe Arts (IGNTA), New Delhi: Katha Vacana Aur KathaVachak : Exploring India’s Chanted Narratives). Molly Kaushaledited and published the proceedings “Chanted Narratives.The Living ‘Katha Vachana’ Traditio in 2001.Dr. Pitiphat convened another workshop in Bangkok on“Thaïs Epics”.A Conference in Ateneo de Manila University took placeduring the French Spring 2000 in Manila: Literature ofVoice: Epics in the Philippines”, as the Philippines OralEpics Archives were launched. Last January 2006, a panelon: “Epics in the Austronesian World” was convened duringthe 10th International Conference on AustronesianLanguages (10ICAL) which took place, this time, inPalawan, Philippines: (http://www.sil.org/asia/philippines/ical.html). Proceedings of most workshopsand panels on “Epics” have been published on varioustypes of supports in the respective countries of Southand Southeast Asia, besides the publications of the verytexts by the scholars themselves.In France: Long chanted narrative is approached as ascore; the analysis focuses on the multilayeredrelationships, at the narrative, semantic, poetical, vocaland musical levels (rhythms, melodies, timbres), as wellas at the praxemic level (motions, movements, gestures),contextual and historical levels.A special issue of Diogènes, The International Journal inHuman Sciences, n°181, “Épopées: Littératures de la voix”,was edited and published in 1998, presenting some ofthe contributions to the seminar at CRO. Besides, threetypescripts of a number of papers along the years wereedited in collaboration with C. Champion Servan-Schreiber for the members of the seminar:-1993-1994: “Interaction oral-écrit: Modes de composition ;Modes de transmission lors de la performance; Modes detranscription”, (87p.)- 1994-1995: “Épopées et Récits de Fondation”, (102p.)- 1995-1996-1997: “Épopées orales, semi-littéraires etlittéraires: Les représentations des héros. Images poétiques,images graphiques, formules mélodiques et rythmiques”, (134p.)A special issue of Purusartha:” Traditions orales dans lemonde indien,”(24 papers) was coordinated and published in 1996, byC. Champion Servan-Schreiber at Centre d’Études del’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, (CEIAS).On May 7 th 1997 at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme(MSH) in Paris, a round table conference bringing togetherthree seminars, was held by J.L Racine, F. Mallison,C. Servan-Schreiber and myself on:”Regards croisés(II):Figures emblématiques, identités, oralité” .From 2001 to 2006 sixty papers on the following topicswere presented at the seminar: Processus de la mémoire etrituels. Noeuds de mémoire. Épopées ,rituels et mémoire sociale.Savoirs et savoir faire rituels I/. Processus de la mémoire etrituels chamaniques. Temporalité, Rituels, Musique, Poésie.Expressions orales, écrites & nouvelles technologies. Savoirset savoir-faire rituels II/. Créativité, performance, rituels. Laformation de la personne. Rituels-Musique-Poésie Mémoiredes Généalogies. Mémoire des Ancêtres. Mémoire des Dieux.During the last Conference on “Réseau Asie 2”, held inParis, September 2005, a panel on:”Processus et supportsde la mémoire: Savoirs et savoir-faire rituals II”, exemplifiedFrench research in Asia, (on line: (http://www.reseauasie.com)and in press. The papers in the present issueof Folklife are offering a more extensive, although limited,insight into the French research in India.INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

5ReferencesOn Vedic Tradition:1964, M. Biardeau, Théorie de la connaissance et philosophiede la parole dans le brâhmanisme classique. Paris La Haye,Mouton.1978, L. Renou, , L’Inde fondamentale. Études d’indianismeréunies et présentées par Charles Malamoud, CollectionSavoir, Hermann, Paris, 231p.1989, C. Malamoud, Cuire le Monde , Rite et pensée dansl’Inde ancienne, Paris, La Découverte1990, C. Malamoud, “La voix et le sacré”, pp. 78-79 et “l‘Inde”, pp. 96-97 dans Le Grand Atlas des Littératures,Encyclopaedia universalis, Paris.2002, C. Malamoud, , Le jumeau solaire, Paris, Le Seuil,La librairie du xxi siècle.2005, C. Malamoud, , Féminité de la Parole. Études sur l‘Indeancienne, Collection “Science des religions”, AlbinMichel, 294p.1963, Recherches sur la symbolique et l‘énergie de la Paroledans certains textes tantriques, Paris, E. de Boccard.——, A. Padoux, Vac1982, F. Zimmermann,On Oral Folk Traditions:F. Mallison, 1991, Littératures médiévales de l’Inde duNord. Contributions de Charlotte Vaudeville et de sesélèves, Publications de l‘EFEOC. Champion, 1996, Traditions orales dans le monde indienCollection Purusartha, EHESS, Paris, 441p.M. Carrin ed. Les Cahiersde Littérature Orale (CLO)F. N. Delvoye, Workshops on “Epics” and a Symposiumon Music in Europe and Asia:1992 "Les Routes de la Soie: Problèmes scientifiques etculturels”, [Colloque UNESCO, Fondation Singer-Polignac,Paris, 13 mai 1991, France].1996, L. Honko (special ed.),”Epics Along the Silk Roads”,Oral Tradition 11/1 (octobre 1996 [A UNESCO Workshop inTurku, 1992, Finland].1998, R. Schott and W. Heissig (eds.), Oral Traditions.TheirPreservation, Publication and Indexing, in Abhandlungender Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie derWissenschaffen, ed. [A Workshop on in Sankt Augustin,Germany, 1995].2000, K.Reilch (ed.), Inter-cultural Music Studies, vol. 11,Berlin,. [International Wokshop on Epics: Performanceand Music, 7-10 septembre 1997, Germany].2001, M. Kaushal (ed.), Chanted Narratives The Living ‘KathaVachana’ Tradition, [a UNESCO Workshop: “Katha VacanaAur Katha Vachak: Exploring India’s Chanted Narratives”.organised by K. Vatsyayan an B. N. Saraswati, IndiraGandhi National Centre for the Arts, (IGNCA), 3-7February1997, New-Delhi, India].2003, J Buenconsejo (ed.)., A Search in Asia for a NewTheory of Music, A University of the Philippines Centrefor Ethnomusicology Publication, Quezon City. [Actsof the International Symposium organzed by J. Macedaon 15-21 Février 2002, Quezon City, Philippines]***1990, N. Revel & J. Dournes, “Asie du Sud-Est”, Le GrandAtlas des Littératures, Encyclopaedia universalis, Paris,pp. 99-103.1993a, N. Revel, “Problématique de l’épopée. Routesterrestres et maritimes”, Les Routes de la Soie. Patrimoinecommun, identités plurielles, UNESCO, Collection Mémoiredes Peuples, pp.99-109.1993b,, N. Revel & al., “Épopée”, Encyclopaedia universalis,Nouvelle édition pour CDRom, et édition imprimée,39 p.2005, N. Revel, “Safeguarding an Intangible Heritage inthe Philippines”, pp.XVII-XIX. “The Teaching of theAncestors” in Literature of Voice: Epics in the Philippines,N Revel, ed., Office of the President Publication, pp.1 -21.2006, N. Revel “Memory of Voice”, Quezon City [10-ICALKeynote Lecture, 19 January 2006, Puerto-Princesa.(On line: http://www.sil.org/asia/philippines/ical.html)in press, The Philippine Journal of Linguistics, (DecembreIssue).N. Revel Guest Editor:1993, Épopées, Cahiers de Litterature Orale 32, INALCO, Mars,Paris, 205p.1998, Diogenes,”Epics Literatures of Voice”, N°181,vol. 46/1, Bergham Books, NewYork.Oxford, 159p.***New NFSC PublicationIndian Folktales from MauritiusDawood Auleear and Lee HaringEighteen magical, romantic, and comic oral tales,from the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean,are here translated into English for the first time.The stories were taken down literally from the lipsof storytellers in the Bhojpuri language. They arenot rewritten or redecorated; they are translatedliterally, and some are given in Bhojpuri.The ancestors of these villagers were forciblyexpatriated from India, a century and a half ago, asindentured labourers. Today, through these tales,they maintain their ancient language and culture.Comparative notes place these Mauritian tales inthe context of world folklore.Illustrations by Kalamkari C. Subramaniyam,i-x + 116 pages, Rs.200 (in India)Rs.200 in Maurtian rupees in Mauritius,US $ 10.00 in Other Countries) ISBN 81-901481-7-6INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

6DENIS MATRINGE, Centre d‘Étude del’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS)CNRS-EHESSTowards the beginning of the twentieth century, aPunjabi poet affiliated to the Qadiri sufi order chosea folk story of the lower Indus valley to write oneof the most exquisite verse narratives ever produced inhis language [1]. His name is Hasham Shah, and notmuch is known about him. He was born around 1753near Amritsar, died in 1823 and is buried near Sialkot[2]. He wrote both in Persian and Punjabi, using thelingua franca of Western, Central and Southern Asiamostly for Sufi treatises and biographies, and his mothertongue for romances is locally known as qissa-s, includinghis masterpiece, Sassi Hasham. The latter is the story ofthe tragic love between the Sindhi princess Sassi andthe Baluch prince Punnun, and its title, as usual withclassical Punjabi qissa-s, associates the name of the heroineand that of the poet.Today, any Punjabi knowing reader is instantaneouslybewitched by the magical charm of Hasham’s poeticdiction, by the delicate subtlety of his touch, by thesustained evenness of his tone, by the suggestive powerof his images, as well as by the harmonious construction,the exceptional concision and the tragic intensity of hisnarrative. All these distinctive features contrast sharplywith the only surviving qissa of the great poetic geniusof the previous generation, the majestic Hir, achieved byVaris Shah in 1767, a poem encompassing many Punjabisocial and religious idioms of his time, in a style at thesame time sparkling, ironic and deeply moving [3]. Thecontrast is indeed immense between the fine chisellingand the perfect harmony of Sassi Hasham and most premodernNorth Indian narrative poems, with theirintricate intrigues and their overlong conventionalpassages.A striking aspect of Sassi Hasham is the kind of culturaldiversity which underlies, without any asperity norawkwardness, its sublime unity of style and composition,and the aim of these few pages is to give a hint about therelation of Sassi Hasham with two great Persian classicsin order to add an element to my previouscharacterisation of Hasham’s poetics [4].It might be appropriate, first, to summarise the story asnarrated by Hasham in hundred and twenty four stanzasA Dialogue withPersian Classicsin a Folk-basedVerse Narrativefrom EighteenthCentury PunjabINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006of four rhymed verses, and toremind briefly how it differs fromother versions. After a briefprologue, Sassi-Hasham consistsin three parts. The first one(stanzas 1-26) is about Sassi’s birthin a royal Sindhi family inBhambor (near Tatta, on the lowerIndus) and her abandonment ina chest on the Indus afterastrologers questioned by herfather have made this prediction:“A faultless lover will she be /when she’s a maiden young. /Then in the desert will she die /by parting’s sorrow slain. / Yet,Hasham, though her kin beshamed / her story will be sung” [1:59].DENIS MATRINGEIn the second part (stanzas 27-82), Sassi grows up withher adopted parents from the washermen caste. As anAdolescent, she refuses wedding proposals in that lowcaste. She also refuses to see her natural parents. Thus,summoned by the king about her attitude, Sassi simplysends him an amulet which he had got tied around herneck before entrusting her to the river and which containsthe truth about her birth. Thereafter, she becomesenamoured of Punnun, a Baluch prince from Kech (todayTurbat in Pakistan), whose portrait she has seen in anexhibition of paintings of royal figures in the garden of arich merchant. In order to attract Punnun to Bhambor,Sassi obtains from her biological father that the firstcaravan merchants coming from Kech to the city be keptas hostages. So it goes, and one of the two leaders of thecaravan is dispatched to Punnun’s father, Hot ‘Ali, torequest him to send his son to Bhambor. The king refuses,approved by his wife, but Punnun, hearing from themerchant about Sassi, becomes enamoured with her.Against his parents’ advice, he crosses the desert ridingon a camel and joins his beloved. When the caravanmerchants arrive in Kech without Punnun, the king andthe whole city are plunged into despair. Both the prince’sbrothers then decide to leave for Bhambor. They findPunnun together with Sassi. Having treacherously madehim drunk, they take advantage of the lovers’ sleep toabduct him and bring him back to Kech.The last part gives the story its tragic conclusion. Sassi,despite her mother’s entreaties, sets off in pursuit ofPunnun across the desert. Burnt by the sun, she looksfor footprints of the Baluches’ camels. She finallydiscovers one, and then looks in vain for another one.A shepherd, who catches sight of her, thinking it mightbe a ghost, does not dare to approach her. Resuming herquest, Sassi understands that her end is near and shecomes to breathe her last on the footprint of the camelwhich had, maybe, carried her lover. The shepherd, then,realises his mistake, buries Sassi and builds her a tomb,near which he decides to live as a faqir, abandoning hisfamily and his herd. Warned in his sleep by Sassi’s soul,Punnun leaves Kech in haste, not without having been

7forced to threaten with his dagger his brothers whowanted to hold him back. His camel takes him directlyto Sassi’s tomb. Learning from the shepherd the deceaseof his beloved, he dies of grief on her tomb, which opensup to welcome him.Hasham’s narrative is based on a folk story known inthe whole lower Indus valley and its surroundings, whereit forms the theme of many folksongs, and where it haslong been transmitted by bards with lots of variations.Thus, Richard Burton [5:81-89] narrates an oral versionfrom Sind which differs considerably both from Hasham’sstory and from the Gujarati version collected by MariannePostans [6:199-202]. Within the Punjab itself, there areimportant variations, as is obvious if we look, forinstance, at the story as it has been recorded in the DasamGranth (“Book of the tenth [Guru]”), the second sacredbook of the Sikhs after the Adi Granth, compiled by BhaiMani Singh at the beginning of the 18 th century. Sassiwas born from the semen spread on the sand of the Indusbank by a Hindu ascetic at the sight of a celestial nymph.She has been married to King Punnun, who had alreadyseveral wives. The latter are jealous of Punnun’s love forSassi and assassinate the king. Hearing of the tragedy,Sassi rushes to the spot of the crime and dies of a brokenheart. The story stresses sincerity and fidelity, whereasso many others in this section of the Dasam Granth dealwith the misdeeds and the vices of women. It is with aMuslim poet contemporary of the compilation of theDasam Granth, Hafiz Barkhurdar, that the version we findin Hasham’s narrative first appears.In the third stanza of his poem, Hasham writes:“listening to the story of Punnun and Sassi, one reachesperfect love”, thereby claiming to compose a story thehearing or reading of which would lead one to that stageof the mystical path where love, the lover and the Belovedbecome one. It was Hasham’s admirable achievement toreach that goal without any religious comment or allusionin his work, without any eulogising prologue (his isreduced to three stanzas, one on God, one on love andone on the composition of the poem) and without anyexplicative epilogue. There is not a word about nor anallusion to the Prophet or to any saintly figure in thepoem, no direct reference to Islam after the mention ofGod in the first stanza and, with the exception of thetwo kings, Adam in Bhambor and 'Ali in Kech, and ofthe rich merchant called Ghazni, the characters have localnames. Like in so many other Sufi poems, human loveand spiritual love are not alternatives [7: 24]. But humanlove is painted in such a way that no misunderstandingis possible.To achieve this, and to cause his lay to produce a maximaleffect, Hasham made full use of all the cultural elementsat his disposal. Folklore of course is overwhelminglypresent through the story itself, which Hasham reworkedin many ways, as, for instance, when he turns theshepherd from a man with dubious intentions into asimpleton struck by the vision of love to the point ofbecoming a faqir. But what I would like to insist uponhere, as it is less obvious, is a specific aspect of his literaryculture mobilised by Hasham to compose a tale on purelove. Like all the members of the Punjabi literary elite ofhis days, the poet had studied the great masters ofclassical Persian literature. Moreover, like quite a fewamong them, he tried his hand at writing a Punjabiversion of Khosrow and Shirin, in the tradition of Nezami(d. ca 1209), who inspired writers for centuries in manyparts of the Muslim world, and who himself hadborrowed the subject of three of his lays (Khosrow o Shirin,Haft peykar and Eskandar-name) from the Shahname ofFerdowsi (d. ca 1020).Both Ferdowsi and Nezami accompany, so to say,Hasham in his writing of Sassi Punnun. Intertextualitywith Ferdowsi’s epic surfaces in the crucial episodewhere Sassi is cast away in a chest on the Indus. Here isan ancient folk-motif, well known in the Muslim worldbecause of the story of Prophet Musa (Moses), and theoldest appearance of which is probably in the legend ofSargon I (ca 2340-2284), the founder of the empire of Akkad.Sargon’s mother put him in a basket of bulrushes andabandoned him to the Euphrates. Akki, the water-carrierlifted him up from the river and brought him up as hisown son. This motif found its way into Ferdowsi’sShahname, where it appears in the part of the epic whichbridges the genealogical gap between Bahman andAlexander through Homay. Bahman is the son of KingEsfandiyar, who has been killed in a nonsensical fightby the great hero Rostam. But before dying, the king hasentrusted his son to Rostam, who educates him andsends him back to the court. There, Esfandiyar’s father,King Goshtasp, who had converted to the religion ofZoroaster and caused his son’s death by ordering him tobring Rostam to his court, gives the throne to Bahman,his grandson, and dies. Bahman first wants to avengethe death of his father, and thus gets Rostam’s sonFaramarz hanged. But he then repents and, havingengendered a son from his own daughter, Homay, hegives her the throne. Homay governs with justice, butshe gets rid of the child she has had from her father byabandoning him in a chest on the Euphrates. The child,Darab, is taken in by a washermen couple. He persuadeshis adopted parents to get him educated as a warlord:his royal quality is soon recognised and he is welcomedas king at the court of Iran. The emperor of Rum, whomhe has vanquished, gives him his daughter. He sendsher back to Rum after she has conceived a son, Darab(Alexander), who later becomes king of Rum. Fromanother woman, Darab has a second son, Dara, whosucceeds him. And when Darab-Alexander attacks Iranand defeats Dara’s army, the latter, agonising after havingbeen slain by two of his ministers, entrusts his countryto Alexander before dying. Thus is the genealogical linkestablished between the kings of Iran and Alexander.Hasham had certainly read the story of Homay and Darabin the Shahname. In Sassi as in Ferdowsi’s epic, a skilledcarpenter is summoned, a chest is finely assembled andrichly adorned, jewels are added to it, a launderer rescuesthe baby and, along with his wife, offers the child a goodlife and gets him (or her) nicely educated. In each case,INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

8having come of age, both the prince and the princessrefuse to live as launderers. There are of coursedifferences too, including an important stylistic one. Theepisode is much more developed, with a more minutenarration, in Ferdowsi, and this very fact tells a lot ofHasham’s poetic intention, as I have shown elsewherein a comparison with Varis Shah [4:31-41]. Hasham’spoem is condensed to the utmost in order to produce amaximal effect on the reader. Besides, unlike Ferdowsi,Hasham creates a sharp contrasts between, on the onehand, the suffering of the baby tightly chained to thechest and her frightening journey on a stormy riverhaunted by monsters and demons, and, on the otherhand, the loving tenderness and simplicity of Atta, thelaunderer who rescues her. Both this conciseness andthis contrast cause Atta’s “pure love” to be more intenselyfelt by the reader.If we now turn our attention to Hasham’s reading ofNezami, we are struck all the same by astonishingelements of symmetry and contrast. In Khosrow o Shirin,Nezami creates three unforgettable characters: Khosrow,the king torn between his love and the throne, Farhadthe architect, first sketch of the perfect lover, a figuremagnified with Majnun in Leyli o Majnun; and Shirin,the dominant character in the novel, incarnating fidelityand mastery in love. Now, there is a striking crossedsymmetry between the way Shirin and Khosrow inNezami’s novel and Sassi and Punnun in Hasham’s poemfall in love. In Nezami’s Khosrow o Shirin, first Khosrowbecomes enamoured with Shirin by hearing his intimatefriend Shahpur singing Shirin’s praises, and then Shirinwith Khosrow by seeing drawings of him made byShahpur and fixed to trees in places where she goes forwalks with her friends (here again well-known folkmotifs). As for Hasham’s characters, first Sassi is struck,the poet says, alluding directly to Nezami’s novel, “bythe wound which once laid down Farhad” [1:77], whenshe sees, along with her friends, Punnun’s portrait inthe merchant’s garden; later on, Punnun falls in lovewith Sassi when he hears one of the caravan leadersspeaking “to him with fulsome praise of Sassi’sloveliness” [1:89]. In both sets of episodes again,Hasham’s dense and tense stylistic soberness is to becontrasted with Nezami’s superb poetic diction,sometimes however verging on mannerism andpreciosity, sometimes somewhat rhetorical. If Nezami’slong (6500 distiches) and complex narrative can be readas a kind of apprentice novel, Hasham’s condensed fableis, once more, entirely oriented towards giving access tothe feeling of pure love.On that matter, it is interesting to note that about themerchant’s garden and its gallery of royal portraits, Sassihad “heard it was as fine as Khotan fabled musk” [1:77].Now, here is precisely the image which a poet like Hafez(d. ca 1390) uses to refer to the smell of the gateway toparadise in the famous ghazal 373 of Khanlari’s classicaledition [8]: barha gofte-am o bar-e degar mi guyam (“Times Ihave said, and again I say”). In a single line of this ghazal,Hafez enunciates both the source of his art and hisexpectation of a mystically qualified reader: gowhari daramo saheb-e nazari mi juyam (“I own a jewel and seek a masterof vision”). The allusion to the musk of Khotan inHasham’s poem is no mere chance; Sassi is on the vergeof entering the universe of pure love, – that jewel whichthe Qadiri Sufi Hasham wants to share. By mobilisingmany aspects of the cultural universe of his reader arounda story which has nothing to do with the rhetoric ofreligion, and through his very personal dialogue withgreat Persian classics, Hasham precisely wants to makehis reader this “master of vision”, apt at following theinjunctions of his own internal master, Hafez’s pir-egolrang (“rose-colour Master”, ghazal 99), – his heart. Itis thus no surprise if, until today, in Sufi convents ofthe Punjab, Sassi Hasham might be read by a master tohis disciples in order to plunge them into a state (hal)conducive to the practice of spiritual exercises [9].References1. Shah, Hasham, Sassi Punnun, rendered into Englishverse by Christopher Shackle, Lahore, Vanguard, 1985.2. Shah, Harnam Singh, Sassi Hasham, 2 nd ed., Jalandharand Delhi, Dhanpat Rae and Sons, 1959.3. [Varis Shah], Hir Varis Shah, poème panjabi du 18 e siècle,introduction, translittération, traduction et commentairepar Denis Matringe, vol. 1, Pondicherry, Institut Françaisd’Indologie, 1988.4. Shah, Hasham, Sassi, texte présenté, traduit et annotépar Denis Matringe, Paris, Langues et Mondes, 2004.5. Burton, Richard F., Scinde or the Unhappy Valley., vol.I,2 e édition, Londres, Richard Bentley, 1851.6. Postans, Marianne, Cutch, London, 1839, repr. NewDelhi, Asian Educational Services, 2001.7. Hafez, Divan, introduction, traduction du persan etcommentaires par Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, Paris,Verdier, 2006.8. Hafez, Divan-e Hafez, ed. Parviz Natel Khanlari, 2 nded., Tehran, Khwarazmi, 1983.9. As demonstrated by Nicole Revel, in the Sulu andTawi Tawi archipelagos in Island Southest Asia, one findsa parallel though distinct attempt in the chanting of andthe listening to a kata-kata like Silungan Baltapa (“By singinga blue print of Al Mir’âj”), the second part of which ismeant to show the Way and has a healing efficacy. SeeN. Revel, with H. Arlo Nimmo, A. Martenot, G. Rixhon,T. Sangogot and O. Tourny, Le Voyage au ciel d’un hérosSama / The Voyage to Heaven of a Sama Hero SilunganBaltapa, trilingual edition (Sinama, French, English),Paris, Geuthner, 370p, 4 black and white pictures, 1 DVDvideo (1 sound file: the epic in integral, +2 files with adiaporama of 110 photos and a narration in French andin English), by N. Revel and A. Martenot.****INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

9LAURENT MAHEUX, Département Inde, InstitutNational des Langues et CivilisationsOrientales (INALCO)Mumal-Mahendra’s story originated and takesplace in Thar Desert. It is still orally performedin this area in three distinct genres by theManganiyar bards. Besides, it was written many timesduring the last three centuries. All these oral and writtenproductions are as many re-centerings of the story, ofwhich emerges a new meaning each time.A shift from study of texts to analysis of the emergenceof texts in contexts was a crucial move in the establishmentof performance approaches. It has established howperformance is anchored in and inseparable from itscontext of use. Nevertheless, processes that anchordiscourse in contexts may be opposed by others – likeentextualisation process - that potentiate its detachability.The entextualised stretch of linguistic production can bede-contextualised from its interactional setting and recontextualisedin another 1 . Then one may ask what makesthis de/re-contextualisation process possible, how it isaccomplished, by whom, for what ends, under whatcircumstances, what is the emergent meaning of the textonce re-contextualised, and so on?The common approach for the study of a corpus thatcontains both oral and written productions consists inregarding those as “versions” of a single story andcomparing them, either to find a relationship betweenthem, or to bring out features that distinguish them. Suchan approach would not have added anything new toexisting works which have already showed that oral andwritten transmissions of a single story parallel each otherin time, and that any one version may draw from eitheror both. Another usual comparative approach consistsin subjecting all these “versions” to a semio-narratologicanalysis and reducing them to a common model -assumed to be original and generative - of which onedefines the structure and meaning. This analysis thatignores the production context is generally limited tomorphological study of the plot (structure, actions andcharacters), whereas the narrative choices, anachroniesand perspectives go towards in setting the interpretativeframework.For my part 2 , I regarded all the texts (written and oral) ofthe corpus as products of a recentering process, of whichI systematically identified the agents, circumstances andmeans. I then subjected each text to narratologic analysis.The Meaningfulnessof Recentering: CaseStudy of a TharNarrativeLAURENT MAHEUXINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006I did not limit it tomorphological study, butalso examined thespatiotemporal universe ofthe plot and how this one isorganised in the narrativewhich exposes it (narrativemodes and perspectives,temporality, etc). These firsttwo stages made possible todraw the interpretativeframework peculiar to eachrecentering and to bring to light the new meaning thatemerges from it. Here are the main conclusions of thisthird and last hermeneutic stage.The words bât, vârtâ and qisso refer to the three oral genresperformed by Manganiyar. These genres are linked withdistinct groups of performers and patrons and constitutedissimilar interpretative frameworks. Among these threeoral genres, two have been studied — the vârtâ, performedfor Sodha Rajput patrons, and the qisso, performed forSindhi patrons.Within the vârtâ framework, Mumal’s story is both aninstrument of exploration of Shakti’s power – conceivedat once as autonomous Goddess and convention-boundwoman – and an apologue about the prince’s dharma. Theprologue, that is peculiar to vârtâ performance tradition,is a kind of mythical narrative in which Mumal isdepicted and acts as many other Rajasthani woman-Goddesses 3 . In the story itself, she embodies the devotedwife (pativratâ), of which she however transgresses thecode of conduct by journeying unchaperoned.Paradoxically, wifely devotion was the very reason of thistransgression.The story thus represents a conflict between requirementsof social code and demands of the crisis to which heroinemust face. The breach in everyday life rules of behavioris justified by the special circumstances of the crisis andreasserts supremacy of wifely devotion over all other socialcustoms and duties in hierarchy of women’s dharma. Butas in any « social drama » (Turner 1969), crisis is resolvedby redressive action and breach is eliminated byreintegration. The satî rite, which proves Mumal’sdedication to her husband and chastity, makestransgression into submission to gender roles andreintegrates the heroine in social structure bytranscending the liminal circumstances of her incursionin male space. The story and its prologue thus underlinesthat women’s autonomy can only be conceived as anattribute of liminal status (either of the wanderingGoddess before she is provided with a temple, or of thedevoted wife during liminal stage of her journey).The problem subjected to audience perspicacity is not todecide whether Mumal is a Goddess or a pativratâ, but toresolve her paradoxical status of being both. The storydoesn’t fully carry on the common split image of Hindufemale nature, but proposes a more unified feminineimage, which is quite similar to the one revealed inRajasthani women’s songs and stories. Nevertheless, theproblem is finally solved in a male perspective. The satîscenario not only resolves a “social drama” but also creates

10a symbolic solution to spatial discontinuity (betweenGoddess’s outer domain and pativratâ’s inner domain),reestablishes symmetry (destructive Goddess vs protectivesatîmâtâ) and transcends the contradictions of the menprojected split image of feminine nature.Either as pativratâ prompting her husband to achieve hisduty or as Goddess repudiating the king who transgressedthe code of honor by failing in his duty to protect women,Mumal stigmatises Mahendra resorting to a derogatorystereotype articulated in terms of the structural oppositionbetween Merchants and Rajputs (“Take your scale andyour weights, your honor is that of a merchant”).Mahendra, who adopted values and customs of Merchantscastes, did not behave in accordance with his own dharma.He is not the only character of the vârtâ who adopted alife style unsuitable to his svadharma. Events that areanalysed as causes of actions on semio-narratologic levelare, on another level of reading, as many breaches ofdharma which induce disorder. The Goddess’s interventionand the kings’ death (in the prolog), then pativratâ’ssacrifice, are the only means of putting an end to it. Themoral of the story appears rather simple then: each onemust live according to its own dharma so as to preservethe world order.The teaching of the story is rather different when it isrecentered in the framework of the qisso performed forSindhi patrons. This framework enables a Sufi mysticinterpretation of the story. However, the story doesn’tlend itself to a linear interpretation where characters wouldpersonify the common fixed roles of the Beloved (spiritualguide, the Prophet or God himself) and of the lover(disciple). These roles are related to, and vary accordingto, the actants (Greimas 1983) embodied by the charactersin the original de-centered story. Thus, Mahendra, whosuccessively embodies the Subject and then the Object,successively represents the seeker who, having masteredthe “lower soul” (nafs), can progress on the Path (tarîqâ),and then the Beloved.Conversely, Mumal, who is Mahendra’s Object of questand thus embodies the Beloved, embodies the seeker orthe “woman-soul” in her own narrative trajectory, whoseanalysis showed that it is similar to that of a hero of aroman d’apprentissage. Mumal symbolises the seeker whodoes not manage to tame the « lower soul ». She did notremain awaken to remember the Lord and failed inperforming the constant recollection (dhikr). She fell inthe “sleep of negligence” (khwâb-i ghaflat) and so has toundergo a long and painful purification process.As in the vârtâ, Mumal finally dies on a pyre. But here,the satî scenario represents the final stage of thepurification process of the soul and the “extinction of theself in God” (fana), which many mystic poets haveillustrated with the metaphor of the moth burning in theflame of a candle. Mumal’s death can be understood asthe annihilation of individual qualities, which leads tospiritual resurrection, and as the body’s death, which iswelcome for the true lover, because it removes the veilthat separated the lover from the Beloved. For the« woman-soul », death on the Path is the day of herwedding with the Beloved. Within the framework of thisbridal symbolism inherited from the Hindu tradition(œakti mystics and bhakti), the image of the satî fully makessense. Adorned of all the emblems of marital happinessas the day of her wedding, she dies as a bride.This interpretation is available only for competentlisteners who know both the paratext (Genette 1982) andthe intertext in which the qisso is encapsulated. The localoral tradition, which is distinct from performance traditionand contains sub-plots and didactic metanarratives whichare never performed, forms the qisso paratext. During theperformance, a network of intertextual relations is builtby the performer who recenters mystic kâfî songs andverses of Shah Latif’s Sur Mûmal-Râno. Interpretativeframeworks of the qisso and of the Sur Mûmal-Râno lendto a rather similar interpretation but are built in quitedifferent ways.Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1689-1752) was the greatestmystical poet in the Sindhi language. He left behind hima collection of thirty poems (sur) that has become knownas the Risâlo. As a part of this collection, the Sur Mûmal-Râno is placed in a set with which it creates a meaningfulnetwork of textual relations. This collection’s internalnetwork links different stories which all belong to thesame generic class, that of “tragic love stories”. In ten ofthe thirty poems of the Risâlo, Latif recentered suchlocally well-known oral love tales, of which heroes andheroines are transformed into symbols of God seekingsoul.This internal network is in its turn embedded in twoother textual networks. Firstly, it is integrated in anintertextual web, that is global or even universal andwoven by Latif who quotes the Quran, the Prophetictradition and Persian mystical poets. Secondly, it isanchored in the paratextual web of performance traditions,which is local. As we have seen, local oral traditionsconstitute the paratext of the qisso and are a constitutivepart of its interpretative framework. In the Risâlo, theinterpretative framework is explicitly given by its author.But the listeners / readers need to know the localperformance traditions in order to understand the stories,since Latif never enters into detailed narration of them,but singles out some elements to develop his teachingsabout suffering and love.This kind of “metonymic recentering”, the “woman-soul”theme and some other features are common to the othersurs. But, as in the qisso, the original actancial structureof the story makes more complex its symbolicinterpretation. In the first two chapters of the sur, Mumalsymbolises the cruel Beloved. In the six followingchapters, she symbolises the “soul that blames” (nafs allawwâma).And in the ninth and last chapter, sheeventually symbolises the “soul at peace” (nafs almutma’inna)when, in a vision of God’s primordial light,she realises that the one she was searching for is in herheart and that “everything is He”. Conversely, Mahendra,who symbolises the Beloved in the last seven chapters,symbolises the seeker in two first ones.Even if, unlike qisso performers, Latif didn’t resort to satîscenario to represent the final “annihilation” stage, hedidn’t change anything in the story’s action and Mumalfinally dies as in all the other recenterings of the story,except one.INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

11The recentering done by the Rajasthani playwright TejKavi (1881-1926) is the only one with a happy ending.One can ask why? Tej Kavi adapted Mumal’s story for adramatic folkgenre known as rammat in the Jaisalmer andBikaner area. Rammat shares many thematic, formal andcontextual characteristics with the Rajasthani Khyâl. Butfirst and foremost local definitional criterion is that actorsand patrons belong to Merchants castes. Tej Kavi reliedon vârtâ and bât performance traditions, which areanchored in Rajput cultural world and so conveys ethic,and other values which are alien or even opposed to theMerchants castes system of values. Mumal’s narrativeworld and its values clashed with the cultural universeof the agents of the recentering. This was not the onlyincompatibility which Tej Kavi had to deal with.Rammat performances mainly took place during Holifestival. Apart from the fact that the tragic end of the storywas discordant with the jubilation atmosphere of Holifestival, Mumal’s death almost always represents therestoration of social order and the victory of the societyfor which “non-standard” love experience represents athreat. This representation of the supremacy of thestructure and collective norm over the individual“deviance” of ecstatic love was much more dissonant withthe context of Holi festival, which is an inversion ritualduring which man and woman are temporarily releasedfrom their statuses.Tej Kavi didn’t only change the representative mode (fromnarrative to dramatic), but also deeply modified the story’saction. This pragmatic transposition (Genette 1982) relieson changes in motivations and modifies characters’valorisation. These modifications (valorisation / devalorisation)are fully actualised only because a newsystem of values has been set up. The Being and the Doingof the characters, even when they remain unchanged,are revalued with the alder of this new system.On a stage where there isn’t anymore any representativeof the social structure, characters are freed from the corsetof the behavioral norms and gain in individuality andhumanity. Mahendra is a sensualist who has“weaknesses”, but he also has wisdom. Mumal does notreproach him anymore his breach in code of honour, butshe praises his intelligence. In the renewed system ofvalues of the rammat, the pragmatic and psychologicaltransformations give to Mahendra’s character a more“sympathetic” part than in the vârtâ, where hisnonconformity with the ideal Rajput devalued him.Conversely, all these changes partially devalue Mumal’scharacter. Neither Goddess, neither pativratâ, nor satî,Mumal doesn’t belong anymore to any one of theprototypic categories of the feminine nature. Deprived ofthe sanctifying trials of virah and suicide, she’s nownothing more than a representative of her “species”, ofwhich Tej Kavi gives an unflattering image. This pejorativestereotype of womanhood goes together with the newfreedom that Mumal enjoys in the rammat. This freedom,which is different from the one the virgin Goddess of thevârtâ enjoyed, is wholly exerted in the field of sexuality.The importance given to the sexual aspect of the relationis a characteristic that distinguishes the rammat from theother recenterings, where it is at most evoked throughconventional images. This element is certainly related tothe context of the Holi festival, but it is also a feature thatdistinguishes the Rajput tales from the Merchants tales.Unlike Tej Kavi, L.K. Chundawat did not change theaction. The transformations which she carried out areless visible but however quite as deep. When we comparethe text she has written and published in 1959 with itshypotext, a Caran manuscript of the 18 th century(MSS 210/20), it is revealed.The quantitative analysis of these two texts shows thatChundawat practiced many excisions and amplifications.The excisions lead to the disappearance of the actors’ socialuniverse. Some of them can be perceived likeexpurgations underlain by the ideology of social progress.The amplifications give a new prominence to thecharacters’ Doing and Being. Some of them are borrowingsto Rajasthani oral traditions and include the story in aPan-Rajasthani intertextual network.The narratologic study reveals that Chundawat also carriedout modifications on the discursive and semio-narrativelevels. She developed the characters’ cognitive andpathemic trajectories and so gave them the depth andthe inwardness of which they were previously deprived.Thus, they also acquire freedom to act and choose. Butthe eruption of feelings, sensations and of the doubt aboutoneself and the world complicates their choices andhampers their new freedom. The subject seems to keepitself aloof from action and from world. Action is notany more the object of a judgment a posteriori, but of apreliminary reflection. The world is not any more thesymbiotic environment on which the subject has a goodhold, but the object of a perceptive experience. Thetemporality of the two narratives is also rather different.For the cyclic time of the narrated world of the hypotext,Chundawat substitutes the linear time of a world whichhas lost its stability and which in its dilations andcontractions seems to follow the variations of the actors’states.Analysing the evaluations (Hamon 1997), one can see thatin Chundawat’s narrative they focus on the actors’environment and states, while in the hypotext theyprimarily focus on the actors’ Doing and on its conformityto social standards. While the hypotext stages and conveysa system of values, Chundawat’s narrative rather pertainsto a phenomenological and knowledge enterprise. Thisdifference also appears in the way in which the characters’physical body emerges in the discourse. In the hypotext,this organic emergence of the body is related to the actor’sDoing and signals the outcrop of a normative system. InChundawat’s narrative, it is associated to the actor’s statesand signals a pathemic apex.The narrative of the hypotext shares much morecharacteristics with what we usually call a “tale”, thanChundawat’s. Even if she herself calls it a “Rajasthanifolktale”, her narrative is much closer to modern shortstory. The narrative universe created by Chundawatsingles out her recentering among all those which werestudied and seems to signal Mumal’s entry in theera of modernity. Chundawat’s recentering is theonly one which presents a feminine point of view onwoman and a unified image of Mumal’s character. It isINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

12perhaps in this way, by conveying a woman’s imagepeculiar to Rajasthani women oral traditions, thatChundawat’s recentering genuinely roots in a Rajasthanifolk tradition.Well before the 18th century, Carans and other bards hadproduced many written versions of Mumal’s story, whichthey spread beyond the limits of Thar on the whole ofthe geographical area of the future state of Rajasthan. Thesetexts were rediscovered by the learned elites who, shortlyafter the creation of the state of Rajasthan in 1949,undertook to preserve their cultural heritage and to builda regional identity. Published in 1957 in one of the manyfolkloristic reviews which had just sprung up, one ofthese manuscripts constituted the hypotextof Chundawat’s retelling. Chundawat added a new linkto the already long chain of recenterings and thusparticipated to the traditionalisation and regionalisationof the story. The study of the successive recentringsdoes not only make it possible to discover thevarious meanings which were given to the story,but also illuminates the way this story of Thar became astory of Rajasthan. The investigation of recentering isthus meaningful in more than one way.ReferencesMss 210/20, 1763, Mahindar vislaut rî vât, Bikaner, AnoopSankrit Library.Adwani Kalyan (Ed.), 1966, Úâh jo Risâlo, Bombay,Vaswani.Chundawat Lakshmi K., 2002 [1959], Mûmal, Jodhpur,Rajasthani Granthagar.Tej Kavi, 1924, Mûmal Mhadare kâ khel, Jaisalmer, JaganNath Hukamcand Kala.Works citedBauman Richard & Briggs Charles, 1990, « Poetics andPerformance as Critical Perspectives on Language andSocial Life », Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol.19,pp. 59-88.Genette Gérard, 1972, Figures III, Paris, Le Seuil.Genette Gérard, 1982, Palimpsestes. La littérature au seconddegré, Paris, Le Seuil.Greimas Algirdas, 1983, Du sens II – Essais sémiotiques,Paris, Le Seuil.Hamon Philippe, 1997 [1984], Texte et idéologie, Paris, PUF.Turner Victor, 1969, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago, Aldine Publishing Co.Endnotes1For an overview, see Bauman & Briggs 1990.2Moumal-Mahendra: Contextes et variations d’un cycle légendairedu Thar, PhD thesis, INALCO, Paris, 2004.3For other examples, see Tambs-Lyche 1999.CATHERINE SERVAN–SCHREIBER, Centre d‘Étudede l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) CNRS-EHESSIn spite of the conventional assertion that India favoursoral culture, compared to the West, in many a case,several factors show that the world of the oralperformance is not cut off from other medias, whethergraphic or written expressions. Long before thepopularisation of printing, those of the singers who couldwrite and read would note down the content of theirsongs in small exercise-books known as puthi. But whatis true for traditional village singers, both man or woman,is even more in the case of the wandering singers.Regarding the long medieval epics, or gatha, sung by thebhojpuri wandering singers, their memorisation is themore difficult, as musical rhythm is quite irregular andcontents are not necessarily versified. Furthermore, asthe singers most often perform outside the native village,Singing Texts andReading Chapbooks:the BhojpuriTraditionCATHERINE SERVAN-SCHREIBERthey cannot bring theirchildren along to train them,and let them benefit theperforming moment toimpregnate themselves withthe gathas contents, as it is thecase in the qawwali tradition,for instance, where childrenoften attend the singingsession inside the verysinging group. Such reasonsmay lead a singer to readilyappeal to the help either of puthi or of printed booklets.In the same time, the public’s taste for the gathasauditions and the eagerness to await the arrival of thewandering singers are undoubtedly reinforced by thepurchase and reading of gatha under the form chapbooksversions. Hence, the question of the memorisation andtransmission of bhojpuri gathas cannot bebroached without an inquiry into the chapbook printingindustry.1. Oral performance and the selling of chapbooks:striking coincidencesAmong the four main trends which have inspired thebhojpuri tradition of gatha (the mystic quest of the ShaiviteNaths, the desire to glorify the chivalric tradition of theRajputs, the mercantile vocation of the nomadic castes,and the pervasiveness of Sufism), all the repertories havebeen printed, either in proper books, in reviews, or inchapbooks. However, chapbooks are the most commonforms, and they are quite cheap also. Except for Ahirsingers of the epics of Vir Kuar and Lorik, who prideINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

13themselves on never using any chapbook version, allother artists do. Though it is not as obvious as the silkindustry or the glass bangles craftsmanship, the marketof bhojpuri chapbooks is an urban phenomenon whichis very successful. An inquiry into the popular printersof chapbooks and on their sales policy reveals the widescale of the sector, inside the bhojpuri-speaking belt aswell as outside of it. The most active of the bhojpuriprinters, and the oldest, is certainly Thakur Prasad, ofKachauri Gali, in Varanasi. He is the owner of twopresses, one in Bombay and another one in Varanasi. Hehas published all the titles of the epic repertoire,including folk songs, kahans, (prose stories), kissa (storiesfrom arabo-persian origin), and popular dramas. His tinyshop in the narrow lane of the bazaar is always busywith customers. The price of a chapbook varies from 10to 25 rupees. The printrun is usually 1000 copies for onetitle. Chapbooks are not only sold at his shop, but alsosent throughout UP, Bihar and Calcutta, in MahatmaGandhi Road, where he has opened a branch.In Patna, the commercial orientation of the printing press,Narayan and Co, in the area of Salimpur, is slightlydifferent. It has specialised in the printing of successfulpopular songs and film songs, together with gathas. Theprintrun is from 1000 to 5000 copies. D.N. Lal, the owner,has published all the titles of the bhojpuri songsrepertoire, gatha and dramas. He sells about 10,000 copiesof gatha chapbooks, and 50,000 copies of songs chapbooksa year. The chapbooks are diffused to Assam, Delhi,Bombay and Nepal.In Calcutta, all the Bengali main printers of the MahatmaGandhi Road contribute to the printing of bhojpurifolklore. For the last 50 years, Loknath Pustakalayfounded by the Trivedi family, has an importantclientele. His printruns are from 15,000 to 20,000, and hereedits the titles every two years. Next to him, BholanathPustakalay and Sachdev Prakashan also provide bhojpurichapbooks.The chaupatiya (chapbook), as well-known, is a smallsize,cheap, light publication,easily carried and handled.Once printed, chapbooks are sent to numerous places ofsale, either by train, lorries, or by special bicycles whichhawkers have equipped with a thela (platform). Butwhereas this activity has vanished in Europe and it isstill alive in north India. The paikar (pedlar) carrying twojholi (bags) full of chapbooks on his shoulders, sings therepertoire of epics while walking along the roads. Hisareas of sale are usually the maidan (circular places) ofbig cities, bazaars, vicinity of railway stations, temples,dargah (tombs of the muslim saints), and mela (fairs). Salesare done either from small carts or straight on thepavement. On Calcutta maidan, every Sunday, while thesingers of Alha-Udal perform the epic, the sellers ofbhojpuri chapbooks are in the space around. On the Patnamaidan, where the performance of Alha-Udal is a dailyevent in the month of July, many stands of chapbooksalso await the customer. The annual itinerary of thewandering singer shows a great similitude with that ofthe paikar. Their performing places also quite oftencoincide with the selling places of printed gatha. Unlessit would rather be the circulation of these chapbookswhich follows the respective itineraries and halting placesof the bhojpuri wandering singers.2. From oral texts to printed chapbooks: Theromanticisation of folkloreNo doubt, the beginning of printing of bhojpuri folklorewas linked to the colonial interests of Britishadministrators. The collection of samples of bhojpuriepics was not undertaken for the sake of folklore, but inorder to furnish good examples of the language toEuropean officials, who were encouraged to learn thevernacular languages of the districts committed to theircare. George Grierson, who had undertaken the firstcollection and edition of bhojpuri gatha, explained that'This would be not only equally practically useful, butwould also be an assistance to students of philology inEurope, and to missionaries' (Gupta, 1970, 45). At thetime of the mass printing industry development, around1880, the folklorists who collected gatha were belongingto the brahmanical minority. In the modern times, theyare more the product of the literate segments of castessuch as Yadavas, Koiris, Kurmis, Bhumihar Rajputs orByaparis. Their name appears on the first page of thechapbooks, and sometimes, their pictures. The mostprolific of these collectors was Mahadev Prasad Singh,from Shahabad district.The matter of fidelity of a printed version to an oral one,from which it derives, has been often debated. As apioneer in discussing the transmission of oral texts,G. Grierson himself often insisted on his faithfulness tothe oral version he had: 'The song is published exactlyas it was taken down for me from an itinerant singer ofthe Shahabad district. I have allowed no theory of myown to interfere with the text obtained' (Gupta, 1970, 137).According to the account of the father of VishvanathTrivedi, the printer of Loknath Pustakalay of Calcutta,Mahadev Prasad Singh used to transcribe in the writtenform the entirety of the repertoire of the wanderingsingers who would regularly perform near the pond ofhis village. And the formulae included in the printedtexts clearly indicate the oral origin of the versionscollected: 'my friends, listen to my story', or 'nobleaudience, listen to my story', or 'And now listen to whatis coming next', 'And now lets see what’s happening toso and so...'. But when it comes to the printing ofchapbooks, the suspicion of far reaching transformationsarises. Frances Pritchett notes that with the indian massprinting industry, 'Ephemeral texts are produced'. Theyare controlled only by the publisher. They are oftenanonymous, often ascribed to an author who may be aplagiariser, translator, compiler or editor. Far moreimportant, however, are those changes which affect thestructure of the plot itself' (1985, 20).Between the oral performance of artists who sing a text,and the content of the bhojpuri chapbook which isprinted, several major shifts are noticeable. Care is takento soften the martial inclination of the bhojpuri hero.Blood sheding battles, kidnappings and rapes are notdescribed as they are in the oral context. A concern forintroducing moral and chaste values where the oral textsINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

14show freedom of relation between men and women, isprevalent. While the bhojpuri folklore insists on amystical quest or in a rajput ideal of land conquest, andleaves no place for love stories, the printing chapbookswith its more and more glamorous coverpages andillustrations, seem to emphasise a romantic view. Whereoral and folk traditions insist on situations of rupture,the chapbook attempts to transform a folk culture intoan idyllic pastoral world. These changing elements, onceprinted, may be incorporated in the oral performanceand step by step change its nature.Such transformations are not specific to the culture ofIndian popular mass printing. The contribution of thechapbook literature, with its centralising impetus, hasoften been perceived as a factor in culturalimpoverishment. This was the case in the history of theprinting of French folklore in modern France(Muchembled 1978, 348-366). From the oral texts sung bywandering bards to a mass printing industry, printedfolklore has gone through a series of changes, losing itsmystical dimension, losing its caste specificity, andtransforming the spirit of the gatha into that of a katha, astory devoid of time and space.Another difficulty arises, if we compare the metricalrythm chosen by the compiler in the printed edition ofa gatha and the melodical structure of the saying of theepic bard. One follows the literary metric rules of themedieval scholarly poetry; the other follows his breathingcapacity. Some stylistic features remain similar, likecomplete inversions of the syntax in prose, the place ofthe subject and the verb being permuted, in order toemphasise the last word of a verse. But yet, the supportof a printed text follows rules that the singer is not usedto. They are closer to the Ramcaritmanas composition ofTulsidas than the bhojpuri folk metre. In the epic of Alha-Udal, the 'alha-metre', which is built up to an extremelyfast speed delivery, is sung in alternance with the 'raiso'tempo, the medieval literary texts compiled in oldmanuscripts (Schomer, 1992).Confronted to this difficulty,the singer has adopted a strategy of his own, varyingfrom the chapbook support to his personal inspirationaccording to the topic of the song and the musicalsupport. Descriptions of battles, for instance, cannot bememorised with the help of booklets. They rely on thedholak’s beat.A pattern of sociability:In spite of the competition of other medias, such ascassettes of folklore songs or filmi git, the taste of thepublic for the long versified gatha has not faded. For thebideshiya (the bhojpuri worker outside the BhojpuriAnchal), who, far away from home, enjoys listening tothe oral performance, the buying of a chapbook is a meansof keeping alive the link with his ancestral land, whilewaiting for the arrival of the wandering singers in hiscity of adoption.Though much less appearing than religious chromos,the illustrations included in the chapbooks play animportant role in the imaginary. Some of them , such asthe scene when the wife of Bhartrihari faints as he comesto beg at the door of his palace, Prince Vijaymal playingthe gulli danda, or Raja Kunvar Singh cutting himselfhis wounded arm in the middle of the Ganga River, arequite famous, and embody the bhojpuri pathos. Theyadd a dramatic dimension to the oral performance, andincrease the veracity of the character whose exploits aresung. The public has favourite passages of a story, likethe arriving of Udal in the court of Alha, or the beggingof alms by Bhartrihari from his mother. How the singerwill perform, is the moment they expect. As long as thesinger comes only once or twice a year in a village,reading the sung story in a chapbook recreates theintimate atmosphere of the oral performance and helpsawaiting for this magic moment.The question of the fidelity to an oral tradition is notvery relevant in a domain where creativity constantlydefines itself in the fertile space between oral and writtenforms.This circulation, back and forth, both of wanderingsingers and chapbooks, shows a pattern of sociability asrooted in an urban culture and in a rural one. It is a signof the vitality of a popular literature which has managedto sustain itself despite massive social changes andcompetition.ReferencesChampion, Catherine, Garcia, Richard (1989) LittŽratureorale villageoise de l’Inde du Nord, Chants et rites de l’enfancedes pays d’Aoudh et bhojpuri, Paris, Adrien Maisonneuve.Gupta, Asha, (1970), George Abraham Grierson aur biharibhasha sahitya. Delhi, Atma Ram and SonsMuchembled, Robert (1978), Culture populaire et culturedes Žlites dans la France moderne Xve-XVIIe siŽcle, Paris,FlammarionPandey, Shyam Manohar (1995) The Hindi Oral EpicTradition, Bhojpuri Loriki, Allahabad, Sahitya BhawanPritchett, Frances (1985), Marvelous Encounters. Folkromance in Urdu and Hindi. Delhi, Manohar Publications.Schomer, Karin, 'The Audience as Patron: Dramatizationand Texture of a Hindi Oral Epic Performance', in JoanErdman, ed. Arts patronage in India, Delhi, Manohar, 1992,pp.47-88Servan-Schreiber, Catherine (1999) Chanteurs itinŽrants enInde du Nord. La tradition orale bhojpuri, Paris, L’HarmattanTiwari, Badri Narayan (2003), Memory and social protest inBhojpuri and Magahi culture regions, Shimla, Indian,Institute of Advanced Studies.INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

15DANIELA BERTI, Milieux, Sociétés, Cultures enHimalaya (CNRS)Aform of oral repertory, widespread in manyregions of South Asia, is what has been called“divine autobiographies” by anthropologists (cf.Campbell 1978, Unbescheid 1987). These involve storieswhich are supposed to be revealed by the deitiesthemselves who, when speaking in the first personthrough the voice of their institutional mediums, recountthe episodes in their life, where they come from, howthey came to settle in their temples, what relations theyestablished with local kings, and so on.In Kullu Valley of Himachal Pradesh, these divineautobiographies are called bharthas (lit. ‘news’) andconcern a special category of temple deity who exercisetheir sovereignty over a territory. They control theweather, arbitrate conflicts, and establish rules. Thoughextremely valorised, bharthas are presented by local peopleas secret and as a kind of knowledge to which they have,in principle, no access. Moreover, bharthas are consideredto be simply revealed, therefore neither learnt normemorised.First, I would like to discuss how the process oftransmitting and (re)producing these bharthas is conceivedand how it can be dealt with from an anthropologicalpoint of view. Second, I will focus on the historical andfunctional transformations of these divine stories which,from being secret, revealed, and closely linked to thelocality, have recently appeared at the very core of aresearch project promoted by an RSS organisation whoseaim is to propagate Hindu nationalism.IBharthas are considered secret in two different andsometimes alternative ways. First, because in many casesthey are recited once a year by the medium in an isolatedplace, in the only presence of the temple’s priest andusing what people call the ‘gods’ language’, devta ka basha,which makes their understanding enigmatic. Second,even in the rare cases where the bharthas are performedpublicly, they are recited in a very low voice, that nobodycan hear. The enigma and the secrecy around these bharthasmay be surprising if compared with the extremeaccessibility and communicability of these deities duringdaily consultations held in village temples, when theyThe Memory ofGods:From a SecretAutobiography to aNationalistic ProjectDANIELA BERTIINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006interact with people in a verycolloquial and spontaneousway (Berti, 2001). By contrast,when they have to tell theirown story, deities hidethemselves, either becausepeople cannot attend thebhartha or because theycannot understand it.Bharthas - when deities aresaid to be speaking directly- overlap with other kinds ofstories about these deitieswhich are not at all secret and are recited by villagersindependently of any ritual context. On the contrary,having been revealed, bharthas are not supposed to betransmitted– no medium will say that he has learnt thebhartha of the god he is speaking for. To know the god’sbhartha without having learnt it is indeed the very prooffor a medium of being the god’s genuine receptacle -though this remains a statement of principle given thatno original bhartha has been memorised which themedium has to abide by. It is indeed a common specificityof possession rituals to play down learning in favour ofrevelation, of spontaneous manifestation.During my fieldwork, in 1996, I tried to collect bharthasby asking the pujaris, since they are the ones in charge ofassisting the mediums during the performance. But thepujaris always told me that mediums speak very quietlyand in a difficult language. As for mediums, they arenot supposed to have any knowledge of the bharthas whenthey are not possessed. It means that, in principle,bharthas cannot be collected outside a ritual context whenthe deity manifests itself.It is in fact on ritual occasions, during ordinary templeconsultations, that mediums disclose some snippets ofbharthas. The degree to which these snippets areunderstood varies from one god to another: in somecases, such as for the god Jamlu, the bhartha may includesome unarticulated sounds, something like“icchaichichaichi, ucchayicchicchaia”. This is supposed tobe “the god’s language” par excellence and the very momentwhen the god Jamlu manifests himself in his “completeform”. In other cases the language used in these snippetsis commonplace but includes poetic or metaphoricalsentences the meaning of which can easily be grasped.This is the case, for example, of the goddess Shravani’sbhartha, from Shuru village:Oh men ! These words are those of the sat-yug(epoch of truth). I destroyed a basket of incense asI destroyed a basket of poison. For eight days Ibrought down rain, for eight days I brought outsunshine. I transformed the dry into green. Youhold the truth, I hold the power.…Having collected snippets of bharthas, my aim in the fieldwas to attend a real one. That did not seem impossible,since along with the general idea that bharthas are secret,people know that, in some places, the god allowsvillagers to attend the performance of his own bhartha.

16The bhartha of goddess Shravani, for example, is publiclyexecuted during the temple’s annual festival. As I wasvery close to this goddess’s medium I was once able toattend the performance. But, in fact, this “real” bharthawas much shorter than the snippets the mediumpronounces during ordinary consultations and nobodycould hear anything. Here the medium, who speaks veryloudly during “ordinary consultations”, was justmurmuring; his eyes downcast in a very inward-lookingposture. Although everyone was straining their ears andtrying to grasp some of it, not even the pujari, who wassitting in front of the medium, could catch a single word!A kind of tension runs thus through the bharthasperformance: they are incomprehensible though at timeslikely to be understood; they are secret though sometimespartially revealed; they are sometimes public, thoughimpossible to be heard.Different interpretations might be put forward here andalso, they are not exclusive of each other.A first hypothesis may be that there has been animpoverishment of knowledge in passing on the bharthasrepertory, due to the fact that what people call a gur kakhandani (the lineage within which the medium’s role ispassed on) is nowadays more rarely maintained fromone generation to another and may easily shift from onecaste to another. Or, even if the succession is maintainedwithin the same lineage, the role of temple medium maynot be regularly ensured. The medium’s role is less“attractive” today than before and it may happen that atemple deity may remain without a medium for manyyears. With gaps in succession and changes in caste, itis difficult to guarantee the transmission of ritualknowledge –especially of bharthas. In certain cases abhartha may have lost its content or this content has beenreduced, while remaining unchanged, as a ritualperformance.Another hypothesis, which does not exclude theprevious one, takes up what Ashley (1993) observed inhis study of teyyam in Kerala where divine autobiographiesare, there also, extremely difficult to understand andrarely sung in their entirety. The author concludes that“their function as a ‘story’ is less important than theircapacity to cause or create (tottuka) the presence of thedivine”(Ashley 1993: 84). The recitation aims less at lettingpeople know about the gods’ story than at manifestinghis existence to them. Ashley does not speak of thesestories being secret but he noted the voluntary intentionof making them inaudible and incomprehensible.The obscurity of the gods’ language has also beenobserved in ancient India by Malamoud (1995), withreference to Vedic gods. The author noted how theBrahmanas tell about the slight modifications certainwords undergo in order to become secret. According tohim, it is as if the gods wanted to possess a jargon oftheir own, distinct from the language of men (Malamoud1995: 106). He defines this as a sort of clair-obscur, sincethe revealed text itself indicates which deformations ithas been subjected to (p. 107). And the reason why godswant to introduce obscurity in their language, as appearsin the texts, is to acquire some consistency, to let theirwords become solid, and substantial, through the verymystery they introduce by deforming them. (Malamoud1989: 244) Compared with the Kullu bharthas, however,the obscurity of the god’s language does more thanintroduce consistence, i.e., it confirms in people’s eyesthat it is really the god who expresses himself throughhis human receptacle.By broadening the comparison, the obscurity and secrecyof the gods’ autobiographies may be interpreted in thelight of what Bazin (2004) observed about the secretsurrounding the king’s face in the African royal audience,where the king receives his subjects by hiding himselfbehind a curtain. His subjects may sometimes perceivethe king’s silhouette, if the curtain is a little transparent;or they may just see the curtain, if it is opaque. But, infact – notes Bazin- “this dissimulation device does notmake the king disappear: rather it manifests the king’spresence, it signals it publicly” (ibid.: 15) As Bazin wrote:“to hide is a (royal) way of showing oneself: only aforeigner might ask if the king is really there” (ibid.).This is what happened to me in Kullu when I started todoubt the existence of a bhartha which would have beenmore than what could be seen in snippets of them…whilenobody else even gave a thought to this!Now, the first hypothesis (of an impoverishment ofknowledge) does not exclude the second one (to givesome consistence by introducing obscurity) as is shownby the works of Barth (1975, 1987) who makes a relationbetween the secrecy (in his case of initiation rituals) andthe constant fear of losing knowledge, of failing totransmit what is considered to be a vital knowledge. Tomake this knowledge secret is thus a way for the peopleof maintaining its cultural value (Barth 1987:48). The valueof the information indeed seems to be perceived asinversely proportional to the number of people who shareit, up to the point of creating the paradox wherebymaximum value is given to a piece of information whenit stops being information, i.e., when only one personpossesses it and does not pass it on (1975:217).Similarly, in the case of Kullu, secrecy keeps intact theidea that bharthas is the authentic story, a story which,being revealed by the deity, has not been transformed inthe course of time.IIThis brings me to the second point I want to discuss.How these secret and inspired stories figure today inthe project run by an RSS organisation whose aim is topropagate Hindu Nationalistic feelings?The organisation in question is the Akhil Bhartiya ItihasSankalam Yojana (hereafter ABISY) which may betranslated as “Plan (in the sense of Committee) for thecollection of History throughout India”. ABISY is aRashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh affiliated organisation createdin 1973 by the pracharak Moropante Pingle in memory ofINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

17Baba Saheb Apte, another full-time pracharak. Inconformity with other RSS affiliated organisations (likethe Vidhya Bharti, etc.) one of the main issues in theABISY’s programme is to show that Aryans have not comefrom the outside but were the original inhabitants of India.This fits in with denouncing the thesis of an Aryaninvasion as a distortion of Indian history strategicallyprovoked by Westerners. In the ABISY vision of history,regional or tribal diversities are considered to be a sortof screen behind which this ‘Aryan past’ may bedisclosed. Indian diversities are thus superficial, sinceat grassroots level they may be linked to one unique(Hindu) culture which is the one handed down bySanskrit texts (the Vedas, Puranas, Mahabharatha andRamayana).The ABISY has tried to propagate its project on historythroughout the national territory by creating local “units”at province, state, and district level. Once a unit is createdthe unit president, together with the unit secretary, hasto draw up a specific project starting with what isperceived to be specific to the region and as a strongelement of people’s local identity. For the Kullu’s unit,the stories of local gods, and especially their bharthashave been placed at the core of the project.The project was formally announced during a seminarheld in Kullu in 1998, when the king’s son, DavendarSingh, was nominated president for the ABISY Kullubranch. Davendar Singh is in the privileged position ofasking for the gods’ bharthas, since his father is consideredto be the mukhya kardar (chief administrator) of villagegods. During the seminar, he formally requested templepeople (priests and mediums) who have access to these“secret” performances, to facilitate collecting theirrespective god’s bhartha and to write it down on paper,even if they do not understand its exact meaning. Thework of ABISY leaders will be indeed “to decipher” thesebharthas (often just some snippets of them), and to revealtheir similarity with Sanskrit texts, by focusing onspecific words or expressions. This would reveal theSanskrit identity of the village gods. For example, thebhartha of Katrusi Narayan Bhalayan of the Tarapur regionis said to correspond to a passage from the BhagvatDasham Skanda, which allows them to identify this godwith the (‘pan-Indian’) god Skanda. The fact that thebhartha is recited not by an erudite Brahman who knowsSanskrit, but by an illiterate and low-caste medium ispresented as an evidence that it is directly recited by thegod.For ABISY leaders, the bhartha becomes the original sourceas well as the proof (praman) of the deity, for the veryreason that it is revealed by the deity itself. In this sense,they consider bharthas similar to the Veda which beingrevealed knowledge is supposed to be a discourse of“truth” par excellence, as Malamoud writes.Moreover, the fact that bharthas are pronounced in a secretor metaphorical language, which can be deciphered onlyby specialists, bestows on these specialists a specialauthority in proposing different kinds of parallelismbetween, not only the bhartha and the Vedas but also -and consequently - between bhartha and science. ABISY’sdiscourse is indeed similar to the general claim amongHindu nationalists that “Hinduism is simply anothername for scientific thinking” and that Vedas converges“with the contents and methods of modern science”(Meera Nanda 2003: 65).Let us take the example of Atthara Kardu [lit. EighteenBaskets] which is the object of many seminars held inthe district. According to a local myth, Atthara karduare eighteen god-snakes who lived inside an amphorain Goshal village and received puja every day by a localpriest. One day the puja’s light felt down inside theamphora provoking a fire which forced the snakes tocome out and run here and there in different villageswhere they are still now living. This local myth is notmuch taken into account by ABISY scholars, who basetheir theories on the Atthara kardu’s bhartha, which theyhave collected in one of the Atthara Nag’s villages andpublished in one of their volumes (Bhagat Ram, 1999).There was obscurity. The world was full of water.We fell down from the sky, and grew up on theearth. We made the earth, made the man. Madefrom gold, could not speak, made from silvercould not speak, made from copper could notspeak, made from god’s dirt then he was able tospeak. From one we became two. From two, ten.From ten hundreds and from hundreds manythousands and from thousands the earth was filledup.They claim (without giving further details) that thesepassages of bhartha have to be placed in relation to theSanskrit “Ganapati story” which would show how theyare “Vedic gods, like Indra, Rudra, Soma who came fromthe power of Vishnu when he was lying on the Sheshnag’s body in the ocean” (ibid.).The same passages of Atthara kardu’s bhartha are thensaid to correspond to something that has also beenproved by geologists’ findings:According to geologists, when the earthtemperature dropped a thick mass of snow melted,the earth turned into water and creation came toan end. Then the water level dropped and a newcreation came about. Atthara kardu entered thebody of Manu [the first man] and made the modelfor the development of mankind...(ibid.)Kullu village gods are systematically going to becomethe gods of Sanskrit texts in ABISY’s publications, and alocal form of gods’ autobiography is used as proof -revealed but also “scientific” - for building, at regionallevel, a national “Hindu conscience”. The result ismoreover that the gods’ bharthas are ridden of their “secretcharacter” by those who saw in their secrecy the verycondition for their authenticity.While studying oral traditions, the points made abovesuggest the importance of taking into account, on theone hand, the context of production and transmissionINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

18of these oral traditions, which may throw light on apossible difference between how oral texts are conceivedby people and how they are actually executed. On theother hand, instead of looking for the “traditional” or“authentic” version of these oral traditions, one has alsoto consider how the concept of “tradition” or“authenticity” may be historically transformed and evenideologically used.ReferencesAshley, W. 1993 Recordings : Ritual, Theatre, and PoliticalDisplay in Kerala State, South India.University of NewYork. Unpublished PhD thesis.Bazin, J. 2004 “Le roi sans visage”, L’Homme, 170.Barth, F. 1975 Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman ofNew Guinea. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, New Haven:Yale University Press.Barth, F. 1987 Cosmologies in the Making. A GenerativeApproach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Bhagat Ram 1999 “The tradition of Atthara Kerdu in Kullupeople’s life”, Bhartiya Itihas Sankalan YojanaSamiti, Kullu (Himachal Pradesh), Kullu, Bisys.Berti, D. 2001 La parole des dieux. Culte de possession enHimalaya indien, Paris, CNRS.Malamoud C. 1989 Cuire le monde. Rite et pensée dans l’Indeancienne, Paris, La Découverte.Nanda, M. 2003 Prophets facing backward. PostmodernCritiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. NewBrunswick, Rutgers University Press.Unbescheid, G. 1987 “A God’s Journey. The Parheli ofthe God Lama from Lekhpu (Sija)”, Kailash, 13,1:49-100.•Drawing aGenealogy ofWestern Nepal’sGenealogiesMARIE LECOMTE-TILOUINEnarrative meaning. However,practical aims appear in thecontents of some writtengenealogies. It suggests that theywere used as proof of status tobe presented to the authoritiesduring the XIX th century, afterunification of this remoteterritory by the Gorkhali army.The end of the genealogy of theDeuba (dated 1845) 1 , for instance,reveals this goal:MARIE LECOMTE-TILOUINE, Milieux, Sociétés,Cultures en Himalaya (CNRS)While found only in written forms in CentralNepal, genealogies (vaµßåval¥) are transmittedin both oral and written forms in the Westernparts of the country. I will argue that a key tounderstanding genealogy is to consider its socialdimension. It is revealed by the conditions of theirproduction in the case of written texts, and by observingthe bardic performance of which genealogies form aprelude, in the case of oral ones.Genealogies from Western Nepal were first published inthe 1960s, but till the present day, these texts have beenreproduced in the local language and none or only veryfew comments about their local uses and the conditionsunder which they were recorded or found are provided.We are thus left with a raw material, without any ideaabout who ordered these genealogies, for what purpose,on what occasions, by whom were they composed,augmented and read or recited, how were theytransmitted, and even more, what they mean.The uses of written genealogiesIn fact, the people who own or know these texts havealso few comments to make on them and do not seempuzzled by their obscure contents. This suggests that theirvalue does not lie exclusively -or even mainly- in their“(...) Månu Deuvå arrived at Upallåtåprå and livedthere. Månu Kumål was also living there then. AsMånu Kumål had no son, he was without an heir.When he was aged 60, he told Månu Deuvå: ‘I haveno son, having received my heritage, would youaccept to support my house and to live with me?’To this request from Månu Kumål, he answered:‘well, I agree, I will support your house’, (...) andfrom that day on he became Kumål. (...) We theKumål, have worn the holy thread since ancienttimes. We are warranted (sadar) with not being a“drunkard caste”, matwål¥ jåt. In the past during a9-year examination period, our caste was warrantedwith being Deuvå since long before [but] we havesupported the house of a Kumål without offspring,and having lived on his properties, we were calledKumål. Our caste, as always, is Deuvå, that is forsure.”If proof of the pedigree and heresy of status may havebeen a frequent motivation for producing genealogies,this purpose is in fact seldom explicit. More numerousare the genealogies describing in detail land propertiesof different branches of a lineage, suggesting that theymay have been used to legitimate property rights. This isfurther ascertained by frequent allusions to very remotegenerations in written claims on landed property, suchas reference to a gift of land made by King Malai Bamfour centuries later. 2 Usually only one or two generationsof past kings’ names are recalled in this type of claim,INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

19but they are sometimes shaped as a genealogy parallel toa royal genealogy. Thus a text written at the time of theking of Dullu, Bhakta Bahådur Íåha, in 1871 recalls (anddocuments) the history of the Raskoti kings whenretracing the ancestors of three ironsmiths, luhår, in orderto reclaim the privileges they had received in the past.If we consider the royal genealogies, a political goal is anobvious aspect of their composition and inscription, ascan be shown in the case of the imperial Malla dynasty. 3However, a great number of genealogies are not selfexplanatory,and shall thus be understood in the verycontext of their enunciation, when the text is recited.The genealogies between literacy and oralityApparently, the genealogies were already transmitted inboth written and oral forms during the Malla period (XII-XIVth centuries). Thus, in the genealogy of the kings ofAcham, King Aßok Malla is said to have provided hisgrandson with a “fictive” lunar clan genealogy after havingit recited and written it down himself. Other elementsreinforce the probability that the kings themselves wouldwrite or recite their genealogies. Thus the Jumalå nareßvaµßåval¥, genealogy of the kings of Jumla (NaraharinathIP: 111-113), uses the first person twice, for the evocationof King Jvålåndhari's and King J¥tåri’s reigns.“(...) the minister of Låså arrived at S¥jå Låmå Thåôåto pay us tribute, [we] told [him]: ‘Do not bringme as a tribute anything other than horses, silver,embroidered fabrics and gold.’ We also killed theTibetan King Ómåpålå and have been respected for364 years. As we had no son, the one namedBairimal, of the Mathurå forest, having helped usa lot, we told him: ‘I give you my kingdom, yourname is now S¥jåpati. (...)’ Having given thekingdom to this S¥jåpati, we, King Jålyålandhari,went to practise austerities in the jungle hermitageof Badrinåth.The son of Bhairi Malla [was] KesariMalla. His son was P®ith¥ Malla 1. His son UjirMalla 1. His son Måhåri Malla 1. His son Vimår¥Malla 1. His son J¥tår¥ Malla 1. Under our reign,J¥tåri Malla, Ch¥c¥ låmå [of] Mugu entered ourservice. During the month of asoj, while we wereplaying at caupiôå with the låmå, when we werewinning, the låmå laughed and we asked him:‘Why do you laugh, O låmå, when we win?’ (...)”This very lively evocation of the dead kings, who directlyaddress the reader or listener, may have corresponded tosomething more than a mere figure of style, since it recallsa real invocation of the great kings of the past. It actualisesthis past and turns the vaµßåval¥ into real journeys backin time. It also suggests that this component might bepresent when the style is less explicit. Indeed the simpleevocation of a dead individual’s proper name (or anyspirit’s name) is conceived as an invocation. It evokes thewidespread worship of past kings in Far Western Nepaland Kumaon, who still possess their descendants andspeak through their mouth. Though they are consideredas a very personal matter, strictly bounded to a particularpatriline, in today’s practices, genealogies are learned andrecited by specialist orators of low status: the bards orhuôke Damå¥. From the most immediate form ofcommunication between the living and dead membersof the patriline in the form of a genealogy using the firstperson, a relation mediated by a low-caste specialist wasthus privileged and we will try to understand the logicof this triangular link.Bard as identity keeperThe huôke sing the genealogies of their patrons beforethe performance of heroic ballads and this séance is calledbaôhåi, “praise”. When oral, genealogies are thusexplicitly conceived as eulogies, panegyrics, and as such,they mark identity and status. Their strong iconic andemblematic feature may explain that they have partly losttheir meaning in the course of time, and have taken - orremained in – a cryptic form. It may also explain thatlocal users do not perceive the situation as annoying. Onthe other hand, as living texts, they play a central role inthe functioning of local society, and cannot really beunderstood outside their context of performance, whichprovides their most important meaning. It is probablymore sociological than historical.The bards are employed by high-caste families, especiallyThakuri, during weddings, and sometimes also duringfunerals. The bard is a glib talker who not only flattersthe audience but also makes them laugh by belittlinghimself or making fun of his assistants. He makes themlaugh by caricaturing the social order, pleasing the “råjå”who then shows his generosity. The role of the bard isundoubtedly to please the Kshatriya patrons, but beyondthis immediate pleasure, he is also viewed by the latteras the guardian of their history and identity. Thisdimension is crucial. While history has often beenpresented as a mere tool of domination for the elite withinthe context of Nepal, oral history in Western Nepal appearsto be much more complex.As revealed by their genealogical knowledge, the bardsseem to be attached to one clan in particular. Otherfamilies can call them for weddings, but they do not singtheir genealogy, only epics. Given this fact, we couldexpect each bard’s corpus of epics to be specific and to beconnected with the history of his attached high-castefamily, in the same manner as their genealogicalknowledge. Apparently this is not the case and sometexts are known from Garhwal up to Western Nepal, suchas the epic (bhårat) of Rani Rawat. As in most of theepics, heroism is mixed here with cunning and violence.In “Rani Rawat”, as in many other epics, the mediationof the bard, and his knowledge of cunning, brings victoryto the Kshatriya hero while facing the enemy whom hisfather could not defeat. Thus, Sobha, the orphan son ofKing Ranai Rawat, who was killed by Meluva Rana, meetsPesio, the huôke bard of his father who is of the opinionthat this boy looks like his dead master. He asks himwhere he is going, with golden clothes and a sword inhis hand. The boy tells him about his plan to kill hisfather’s murderer, but the bard warns him that he will bekilled and that he should rather hide in a basket and thathe himself would carry to Meluva. When the bard givesINDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

20the basket to King Meluva, the boy jumps out of it andkills him.This story contains the leitmotiv which may help tointerpret the meaning of the genealogical knowledge: thepatriline may be broken, especially when the father dieswithout offspring. In the Western Nepal epics however,the breaking of the line is never complete. First, the funeralrites of the dead hero are postponed by the capture of hishead by an enemy, which prevents the funeral rites fromtaking place. Secondly, the hero has a son, who usuallytakes birth after his death. The son is then considered asa negative being, the one “who ate his father”, since thelatter met death when he was entering life. To recover anormal, prestigious position, the son needs to substitutehimself for his father and to accomplish in what he failed,that is, to kill his father’s enemy, an action which formsa sine qua non condition to bring back the father’s capturedhead. This substitution is fully developed and the childneeds his father’s horse, dogs, clothes and sword, tosucceed. His first difficulty is thus to be recognised ashis father’s son, when his father cannot attest to it, inorder to get his paraphernalia. Obviously, in contrast withthe high-status individuals who scorn the orphan, as theson of a widow, or son of a bitch, his late father’sservicemen remain faithful even after their patron’s death.They are the ones who attest the boy’s descent by theirsense of observation (“this boy looks like my master”)and by their intimate knowledge of their patron’spsychology (“this boys reacts or behaves like my deadpatron”). Thus the integrity, identity and prestige of theKshatriya lines are maintained by the bard and the otherservice men, rather than by their kinsmen or matrimonialallies. The family bard is also presented as the one whoenables his master’s victory by teaching him the tricks ofwar. Interestingly enough, these tricks are often relatedto the hero’s identity as well. The bard hides the Kshatriyahero’s identity from his enemy when putting him in abasket, when dressing him up as a bard, or by throwingpepper in the enemies’ eyes. Thus, on the one hand, thebard restores the hero’s lost identity by recognising hisdescent through physiology or psychology and empowershim by giving him the ancestral weapons and attire. Allthis is kept secret and forms the cunning nature of thebard. It enables the scorned hero to recover his dead father’ssevered head, perform his death ritual and thus restorethe patriline as well as his own social position as itsmember.Narrated as a prelude to this type of narrative, genealogyin Western Nepal is thus understandable only whenplaced in its traditional context of enunciation. Sungprincipally during the establishment of alliances,genealogy forms a kind of prelude to epics, whosecontents highlight the whole of the performance of praiseand the relation between the bard and his patron. Inaddition to the contents of the epics, the rituals of theThakuri wedding reinforce the crucial position which isconferred on the bard by and for his royal patron. Indeed,the åßikå, a short form of genealogy, is first sung by thebard at the auspicious time called lagan, which is markedin this region by the first cut of scissors made by theDamai on the fabrics which will be used for the wedding.It should be noted that the bards (or huôke) belong to theDamai caste (tailors and musicians). Then, the bard opensthe groom’s wedding procession and sings along the way.Mid-way, it is the family bard from the bride’s side whocomes to meet and lead the allies, and when theprocession reaches the bride’s courtyard, the groom’s bardonce again sings his patron’s åßikå. After the weddingrituals, the bride’s family bard again accompanies the brideand groom in the procession up to the mid-way point,and when they reach the groom’s house, his huôke singsthe longer genealogy, vaµßåval¥, and then resumes theepics.The bard is thus a mediator, an intermediary betweenthe different Kshatriya clans as well as their representative.Bound closely to one of them, he accompanies his patron,sings his praise, and most importantly his prestigiouspedigree at the difficult times of the meeting with otherThakuris, with whom he is, by definition, in competition,at times of war in the past, during matrimonial alliancestoday.The bardic séance may be viewed as ego-boosting therapy,during which the bard evokes the ancestors’ names andbrave deeds of his patrons, which flatter their Ego somuch that they pay for that. They even pay extra moneywhen personally praised for their beauty, their majestyor their lofty function. The genealogy is part of this séance,since to be born into a prestigious and ancient family iscertainly one of the most important features of theKshatriya identity. In many ways, the bard seems to actas a psychoanalyst for the Kshatriyas, he knowswho they are and the art of asserting it. But he alsoseems to be playing with their vulnerable patrons,who are never sure enough about who they are, and howgreat they are, in the same way that they portraythemselves in a grotesque and miserable way toremind them how poor they remain in spite of theirancient loyal services. To pay is part of the Kshatriya’sgrandeur, which is again conferred on them by the bardbeggar.ReferencesLecomte-Tilouine, Marie, ed. Forthcoming. Bards andMediums in the Himalayan Kingdoms.Naraharinath, Yogi. 1956 (2013 V.S.). Itihas prakas 2,1. Mrigasthali: Itihasaprakashasangha.Nepal Yatri, Purnaprakash. 1978 (2035 V.S.). Setiancaldigdarsan. Biratnagar: Himalisaugat prakashan.Endnotes1The Nepali text is published in P.P. Nepal Yatri(1978: 300).2A claim on pasture rights dated 1870 recalls that they werereceived at the time of Malai Bam, 14 th century (Naraharinath1956: 346-49).3See M. Lecomte-Tilouine ed., forthcoming: Bards and mediumsin the Himalayan kingdoms. (This collective volume exploresthe bardic and mediumic practices of the Central Himalayas.It is illustrated by several videos included in a DVD Rom).INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

21CHRISTINE GUILLEBAUD, Laboratoired’Ethnomusicologie, Paris X, NanterreLaboratoire d’Ethnomusicologie, ParisThe question of multisensoriality or interactionamong senses, has been subject to manyresearches in anthropology and history (Corbin1990, 1994, Howes 1990, 1991, Leavitt and Hart 1990).Ethnomusicology has favoured most of the time theunique dimension of hearing, underestimating theconstructive role other senses - in particular visual -might play in musical performance. The domestic ritualsI have observed in Kerala (South India) offer a challengingexample of intersection between sound and visualidioms. Some specialists from low caste communitiesare using a transversal concept, the notion of “form”,i.e., rupam, to describe composition process in musicand graphic repertoire as well.This paper focuses on a domestic ritual known as “pambintullal”, literally “trembling of the snakes”. This ritual isperformed by a low status community, the Pulluvan,who is in charge of the cult of snake deities, naga orsarppam. These musicians work for upper castes familiesand provide several kinds of rituals and musical servicesin order to cure sins and to keep misfortune away. Theaim of Pulluvan’s activities consist in maintaining thefertility and the prosperity of the landowners throughthe worship of family snakes deities.This ritual is also known as kalameluttu pattu’, literally“song and writing of kalam”. The kalam “area” or “space”is a drawing on the floor made of colours and powders.It represents the deities invoked in complex interlaceswhich are several metres large. Epicentre of the wholeritual action, it is used as a privileged means to call thedeities or make them appear. It is erased after each nightof ritual. This ephemeral drawing is always accompaniedwith music, both instrumental and vocal. The songs,pattu’, usually narrate the origins of the deities and theiracts. They comment also upon the ritual actions whichare performed simultaneously, for instance the detailsof offerings, prayers and the attitude of the audience.Variation andInteraction betweenMusical and VisualComponents in aKerala Ritual forSnake DeitiesTwo media, visual andsound, form a very uniqueway of worship. ThePulluvan specialists aremusicians and drawers aswell. How to analyse theintertwining betweenmusic and drawing in thisparticular ritual?The songsThe corpus consists ofstrophic songs with a fixedtext. Musicians identifyeach song mainly by itstext. Since, the tune and rhythm change from aperformance to another. In Malayalam, the language ofKerala, the term rupam (form) denotes the tune. The wayof rendering the text follows a single melodic linereiterated along the entire text. The rhythm consists of acycle, talam, constant during the entire song.CHRISTINE GUILLEBAUDThe detailed analysis of the corpus reveals that eachmusician has his own way to render a same text. I haveidentified ten rhythmic cycles and about twenty melodicprofiles, the two main stocks in which the musiciandraws from. At each performance, the singer composesa new combination of a cycle and a tune according tohis own inspiration. The musical expression variesaccording to a principle of interchange and variation.FIG.1A ET 1B: Two versions of the song Naveru’(Throwing the tongue) performed by Padmavati andJanaki. The purpose of this song is to protect upper castesfamilies from the influence of evil eye and evil tongue.The singer accompanies herself with a musical pot,kutam, in which a string has been fixed. The rhythmiccycle follows three pitches (low, medium, high)according to the tightness of the string.Fig. 1a : Padmavati’s version. Tune 1 combined with a cycle of7 beats (3+2+2).INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

22Fig.1b : Janaki’s version. Tune 2 combined with a cycle of 2beats.Aesthetics of variationThe musicians describe the two versions (See figs.) asthe same song because of the similarity of the text. ManyPulluvan explain: “This is the same song, but it isdifferent”. They underline the unity of text but thedifference in musical realisation. Pulluvan musicians havedeveloped a specific discourse about variation. To thequestion “Why the tunes are different?”, they usuallyrefer to kalam, the drawings made on the ground:“According to the imagination of the artist, any form ofkalam can be drawn. Our ideas must be discussed withpeople who are with us otherwise the kalam form willbe of a different type. For that, mutual instructions willbe given. The snake kalam is one, but we are drawing itin different forms, rupam. This is the same for songs, thestory is always the same, but the tune changes!”(Interview with Pulluvan Ramakrishnan, 2000).The musician-drawer Ramakrishnan states a principleof variation in music and graphic activity as well. Duringhis explanation, Ramakrishnan took a small notebook inwhich he drew many sketches of kalam. Musiciansusually use this support to memorise song texts andgraphic techniques. The notebook is the main supportof their reflexivity. It is also a way to create new forms ofkalam and to “test” the interlaces before drawing them inthe courtyard of the patrons.Fig. 2: Two forms of kalam « with two heads »These are two forms of the same kalam “with two heads”,also called with the name of deities “Jewel snakeManinagam/ Virgin snake Kanninagam”(fig.2). We note thetwo heads of the snakes, common to both sketches. Thenumber of snakes usually denotes the category of kalam.Pulluvan categorise the drawings through their fixedelements and similarly they identify the songs by a fixedtext. In the same way, specialists use different stocks ofvisual elements (colours, form of motives) just as theychoose different possibilities of musical elements (tunes,cycles).Pulluvan’s search for variation, both in music and kalam,refers to the ritual action as a whole. In this context, thevariation of music and drawing guarantees the ritualsymbolic efficacy. Musicians explain that what is“beautiful”, bhamgi, concerns mostly the variation. Themore it varies, the more beautiful it is. If the kalam changesfrom a ritual to another, the deities will be pleased andthe ritual will be successful. The search for “beauty” isembedded in the ritual necessity to please the deities.Here, aesthetics and ritual efficacy proceed from the sameintention. In the same manner, the patrons of uppercastes families are really sensitive to the beauty of themusic and images. They usually select the “best”Pulluvan for his skills both in song and drawing.About “Intersection”The ethnographic account of the “audiovisual” activityof this caste of musicians shows complex interplaybetween visual and sound, which must be thought hereas two interdependent variables. Music and image appearin a process of “intersection”, a concept developed byFrench musicologist Jean-Yves Bosseur (1998), in thecontext of Western contemporary arts of the twentiethcentury. According to, the concept of intersection denotes“the intervals that can be understood as unifying and/ordistinguishing different artistic practices” (1998 : 8). Suchdefinition raises a broader discussion about the differentmodes of convergence between visual and sound idioms.Intersection, as an analysing tool, enables us to qualifythe different techniques or processes used to link visualand sound, as synestesia (ibid: 9-48), interplay betweenspace and time (ibid: 49-90), “structural homologies” (ibid:91-131) or “plural activities” (ibid: 91-131).In the Pulluvan example, music is part of a compositepractical knowledge. The study of musical and graphicrepertoires enables us to throw light on one aspect of“intersection” only. Here the intersection denotes acomposition process. Indeed, besides music andgraphics, there is also sophisticated interplay betweenspace and time on the ritual space. These are alsoformalised as an intersection by the musicians and otheractors of the ritual (Guillebaud 2006ip).The most striking aspect of Pulluvan’s theories is thestatus which is given to the music itself that music isalways defined as non existing by itself, but only byreferring to another art and knowhow. Referring to anexternal component, the visual medium, or the plasticityof drawing, provides the music with its concepts.INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

23ReferencesBOSSEUR Jean-Yves1998 Musique et arts plastiques. Interactions au XXe siècle.Paris: Minerve. Coll. Musique Ouverte.CHOONDAL Chummar1981 Pulluvar (janatapathanam). Trivandrum:Charithram Publications.CORBIN Alain1990 “Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle”.Anthropologie et Sociétés 14(2). N° “Les cinq sens”: 13-24.1994 Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culturesensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle. Paris: ChampsFlammarion.GELL Alfred1998 Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford:Clarendon Press.GUILLEBAUD Christine2004 « De la musique au dessin de sol et vice versa.Un répertoire kéralais de formes sonores et graphiques ».Cahiers de Musiques Traditionnelles. vol.17: Formesmusicales, 217-240.2006 (in press) Musiques en parcours. Chanteurs itinerantsdu Kerala (Inde du Sud). CNRS Editions. Coll. MondeIndien (+ 1 DVD-rom).HOWES David1990 “Les techniques des sens”. Anthropologie etSociétés 14 (2). N° “Les cinq sens”: 99-115.1991 ed. The Variety of Sensory Experience. A Sourcebookin the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University ofToronto Press.LEAVITT John and HART Lynn M.1990 “Critique de la raison sensorielle. L’élaborationdes sens dans une société himalayenne”. Anthropologieet Sociétés 14 (2). N° “Les cinq sens”: 77-98.RAJAGOPALAN L.S.1980 “The Pulluvans and their music”. The Journal ofthe Madras Music Academy 51: 72-80.VISHNUNAMBOODIRI M.V.1977 Pulluvappattum nagaradhanayum (pattukalumpathanavum). Kottayam. National Book Stall.The theme of January 2007 issue ofIndian Folklife isThe Legend: Conceptual Issuesand Pragmatics of TellingGuest Editor:Kishore BhattacharjeeProfessor and Head, Folklore Research Department,University of Gauhati, Assam.Email: bhattkishore@yahoo.co.ukThe folklorists have paid relatively little attention to the legendcompared to the privileged genres like the myth, epic and thefolktale. It happened because the genre was not utilised fornationalistic or colonial politics like many other items of folklore. Itsdefinition is based on western experience and does not exactly correspondwith Indian reality or situations outside Judeo-Christian societies.Therefore, it is necessary to address the issue of cross-cultural definitionof the genre. Similarly classification of legends also posits problems.This issue of Indian Folklife will deal with the comprehensiveunderstanding of the genre in folklore scholarship, the functions oflegends in different cultural contexts, the relationship between legend,belief and politics. Moreover, so far little attention has been paid toIndian urban legends and there will be an attempt to outline the stockof Indian urban legends also.INDIAN FOLKLIFE SERIAL NO.24 OCTOBER 2006

24PURUSHARTHA,SOCIAL SCIENCES INSOUTH ASIAMARIE FOURCADE, chief editorhttp://ceias.ehess.frPurushartha 18, Oral Traditions in South Asia(Catherine Champion, ed.), 1998, 448 pagesThis thematic volume on oral tradition privilegesthe notion of circulation of texts and inquires onurban forms of civility in which folk literature isinvolved. Three relevant questions arise here :- Evolution and transmission of traditionalrepertories in a context of growingurbanisation.- How to face the competition amongmassprinting, « filmi git » and cassettes.- Orality as a mode of expression of a collectiveimaginary or of a more individual andemotional style.Purushartha 20, Indian Theatres (Lyne Bansat-Boudon, ed.), 1998, 368 pagesIndia has a love for theatre. This is what thisvolume accounts for, in its plurality and fromvarious points of view, such as, philology, literaryanalysis, history, sociology, actresses’ testimoniesand even poetry.The scope to the scene of ritual as well as toaesthetic and philosophical reflection allows foran analysis of the relationships between theatreIndian Folklife Regd. No. R.N. TNENG / 2001 / 5251ISSN 0972-6470and reality, together with an exposition ofarguments on degrees of embodiment: theatricalcharacterisation and ritual possession.Purushartha 24, Literature and Cultural Poeticsin South Asia (Annie Montaut, ed.), 2004,268 pagesClassic literature, oral « folk » literature, cinema,painting: the approach of these cultural subjectscan be inspired by ethnology, stylistics,philosophy, or can use the methods of culturalanthropology, of textual analysis, of sociocritic,or of the theory of reception.This book combines the contributions ofresearchers and famous artists, writers andpainters. Its diversity gives an idea of theaesthetic creation in contemporary India. Theglance of the artists themselves, parallel to thecritic’s one, answers to the general plan of thisvolume, i.e., to grasp the modes of consciousnessand knowledge in the aesthetic shapes, today, inIndia.Purushartha 25, Hindu Rites. Transferts andTransformations (Gérard Colas & Gilles Tarabout,eds.), 2005/2006, 504 pagesRituals are generally understood as repeatingexpected patterns of movement and utterance,either transmitted within one’s own group orborrowed from others, but always originatingfrom within a “tradition”. They are “age-old”practices. However, even when a ritual is said tohave been preserved, or carefully reproduced incase of borrowing, its relative importance,motivation and “meaning” (for the peopleconcerned) necessarily vary. The contributionsin the present volume, document and criticallyanalyse “Hindu” rituals as social and historicalconstructs, by focusing specifically ontheir circulation in space, society and time:what determines the fate of rituals across historyand cultures? what is at stake behind theircontinuous (re)appropriation / rejection by agiven society? and which are the mechanismsinvolved in their constant interpretation? Theapproach is based on epigraphy, history ofreligion, history of literature, sociology andanthropology.Published by M.D. Muthukumaraswamy for National Folklore Support Centre, #508, V Floor, Kaveri Complex, 96, Mahatma Gandhi Road,Nungambakkam, Chennai - 600 034 (India) Tel/fax: 28229192 / 42138410 and printed by M.S. Raju Seshadrinathan at Nagaraj and Company Pvt. Ltd.,# 4/262, Old Mahabalipuram Road, Kandanchavady, Chennai 600 096, INDIA. Ph:+91-44-24489085 Editor : M.D. Muthukumaraswamy(For free private circulation only.)